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GOING
DOWN :: TIMOTHY HAWKESWORTH |
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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. |