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GOING DOWN :: TIMOTHY HAWKESWORTH
The Esther M. Klein Art Gallery is pleased to to show selected paintings and drawings of the Irish born artist, Timothy Hawkesworth.

Hawkesworth's large expansive paintings draw heavily from his experience with the Irish landscape and his many years as a figurative painter. Now, the figure is reduced to a knot of energy which is hurled through the landscape: it is a physical, visceral journey. The immediacy and forcefulness of this movement pushes against the structure of the painting. This work is about "passage" and seems to bare witness to how our vulnerability as human beings contrasts with the tenacity and brut force of our nature. "Hawkesworth's art," as Donald Kuspit has pointed out, "is existentially and humanistically oriented. It is concerned to articulate a tragic sensibility: art once again engaged with trying to say what it means to be human."*

These concerns are also evident in Hawkesworth's work on paper. There is an urgency and sense of disruption in the marks and battered surfaces of these drawings. The energized mark relentlessly makes and unmakes the images which seem to come to us as survivors rather than products of the process. Hawkesworth writes, "It is this submersion in the process of making that I trust - this wonderful place where the mind is made fluid. This is where I am most myself, most free."

Timothy Hawkesworth grew up in Ireland where he attended Trinity College, Dublin. His work has been exhibited regularly in New York over the last twenty-five years and he is also represented by galleries in Atlanta and Santa Fe. He lives in Haverford, PA and is the director of the Norristown Arts Building. Hawkesworth teaches drawing workshops at different locations around the country including locally at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Norristown Arts Building. His work has received considerable critical attention and is in many public and private collections including the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

*Donald Kuspit. Irish Studies Program 1986. Northeastern University, Boston.
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