Art And Parcel
About Artist - Tim Sainsbury
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'Painting, is a highly personal activity. A unique impulsive statement or record about an experience, felt, observed, or imagined. Concepts and experiences are common ground, its how the individual translates and personalizes an idea that takes it into the region of an art form. Therefore the most mundane can take on significance, becoming sometimes exciting, sometimes profound, and at the very least always interesting.
An aspect I find suspect about art and artists is the frequently pretentious talk which, when examined, frequently turns out to be “hot air” and its that commodity that baffled brains. To my mind having to talk about a picture is a certain “turn off” and a way of killing the painting – dead! Much better to allow the viewer to ask questions. Each viewer will then approach the painting on his/her own terms without preconceptions – questions will then be individualistic and will draw the artist out making him more aware of his work – I have known viewers to mention aspects of my paintings that I was totally unaware of.
Perhaps an artist task may be to explain the objective, leaving the subjective open to interpretation. The problem with all of this is that often viewers do not like to think, they would frequently prefer to be told.
Coming as I do from an agricultural, non-conformist rural background some paintings are of figures in landscapes, people at work or at rural functions. The Chapels, those small isolated buildings that drew congregations from large areas I find interesting. They hold in their cold stones the memories of burials and baptisms, of joy and sorrow and sometimes feature in my paintings. These places have strong association for me. The years of boyhood in South Wales come back clearly across the time span. In particular I remember Sundays. Solemn and darkly dressed people attending Chapel, the sermons were sometimes “hell fire” with the local preacher thundering at his “flock”. I remember those, not that they did me any good – but mainly I remember the somberness heightened in winter by the stark trees and dismal low skies. On weekdays these same people, including the preacher, would be seen at their work, hedging, feeding stock, ploughing, killing chickens etc. all the myriad tasks of wresting a living from the land. Both my Grandfathers had small holdings of ground, maybe five or six acres, with mixed stock so there was always something of interest going on. Haymaking was a family event – the small fields were cut, gathered and stacked entirely by hand.
In those days Chepstow had a military hospital peopled by the permanently wounded and shell shocked survivors of The First World War. Groups of these men in their blue suits, white shirts, and red ties would be out and about the town. Some of these ex-soldiers still suffered, and in their mental conflict would frequently fall down in violent fits, terrible, but full of interest to small children such as myself.
Sometime during my early teens I read Ray Bradbury’s “The Illustrated Man” which has been and still is a starting point for some of my more literal paintings.
Therefore the paintings run in series - 1/Figures in landscapes 2/Landscapes - 3/Men in blue suits - 4/The Illustrated men. Of course there are paintings that lie entirely outside of these confines, “The Hermaphrodite” being an example.'
Tim Sainsbury July 2003
'Tim Sainsbury, born on the English/Welsh border, has a “foot in both camps” and draws on this dual personality . He paints, nowadays, almost exclusively from memory and imagination. Memory is paramount, for as he says “when a memory has been distilled over maybe 50 years it has to be significant”.
His method of working may seem to the casual observer to be at first careless and arbitary, he says, “I apply the paint in a casual manner, not attempting to capture the image I have in mind but rather waiting for it to appear, then the serious business begins”. The paintings, therefore are sometimes like journeys into the sub conscious especially at the commencement.
He says “Images in the memory are rather like pages in a book, when turned rapidly, you only get glimpses, but one of them will be the starting point for a painting. How the work develops from that point is down to the imagination and pictorial relationships”.
Here is a painter who works in the style of the British painters who were active pre and post war, figurative and imaginative, many styled by Herbert Read to be “Neo-Romantics”. Read says, “By nature the genius of our painters, architects and poets was always romantic”.
To sum up Sainsbury’s paintings can be seen as a true continuity in the British Tradition, which is deep-rooted and substantial, paintings that evoke and reflect our grey skies and undulating landscape and the idiosyncratic people of these islands.'
John H Clifford - Wiltshire - March 2004
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