Tim White:
The Blue Paintings

The blueness of Tim White's recent suite of paintings is both literal and subliminal. As if seeing the world through a particular mood or condition, the painter has calibrated the color to his vision with remarkable sensitivity.
These paintings are very much about vision itself, and only in the more recent work such as Study of a Cathedral I and II does that interest in vision translate to an interest in light, here seen through stained-glass windows. The slightly earlier paintings have a mysterious, nocturnal feeling. In Black Light, where shape and its absence, as well as movement, are suggested, the concern is with imagining how the eyes of nonhuman organisms, such as dragonflies, see. Landscape with Black Dandelions presents the flowers of the title whose very name causes a listener to think, "yellow" - as black spots against a deep blue ground. The painter deals with these objects as negative space - removed from color and daylight.
In more dreamlike paintings, such as Blue Bull, where the viewer comes face to face with the veiled image of a bull, the intent is neither realism, nor impressionism, nor abstraction, nor really surrealism. As Tim White puts it, "the theme is reminiscences and prototypes. . . meetings with the image of something in the air, what you are looking for and that is on your mind. . . and when struck with it, when you see slowly moving out of the fog the big blue bull of your dream, you ask yourself. . . if it does exist or just seems to for a second (you mistook something else's silhouette)".
White is interested in narrative, in stories, windows into the observers' thoughts and visions, as well as those of the painter. He draws a parallel to music, where "a few bars give an idea of what direction to go in, then the listener dives in." For him, the subject of his painting should be intriguing, giving "a small hint to the observer as to the direction in which their thoughts can travel."
Contrasted with the literary and philosophical side of these works is the structure and rendering. Trained as an architect, White retains a sense of geometry, even the grid, as a basic, though subtle, underpinning for his ethereal expressions. Whether in the faint forest of vertical tree trunks in the background of Blue Bull; the urban girders of Escape (where a whitish bird floats across the foreground); the line of illuminated portholes in Feeling of the Big Ship; the Gothic architecture of the cathedral paintings; or imposed, as in Restoration of a Portrait, which is seen through a canvaslike grid; the structure is always there. In the painter's more recent work, the cathedral paintings and Gold of Pre-Columbian America, the use of white as a contrasting element to the blue and black results in paintings where a broken-up, gridlike feeling is more pronounced.
An admirer of classic American abstraction - particularly the work of Richard Poussette-Dart - White can be seen moving in a more painterly direction, while retaining his interest in what he calls "mind games." Concerned to find themes that will make him feel more at home in his new environment, he has been experimenting with Pre-Columbian symbolism. The matching of new subjects to new moods and techniques will, no doubt, lead to new color concentrations. "I can imagine doing a series in red," the painter says. But as a record of this important and transitional time for the artist, one can imagine no other color but blue.

Cynthia Nadelman
Art Critic
Contributing Editor Art News