Timothy McDowell: Panel Paintings: Geometries and Allegories, 2021

Timothy McDowell 

Panel Paintings: Geometries and Allegories, 2021 

Marcia Wood Gallery is delighted to announce, Panel Paintings: Geometries and Allegories, 2021, Timothy McDowell’s ninth show with the gallery now located at the Miami Circle art district. The show comprises approximately fifteen works of oil on wood panel as well as ten portraits on wood panel. 

Timothy McDowell hails from West Texas, where as a child he found himself wandering through nature. A pastime that hasn’t faded with time he has explored throughout his life, from Icelandic glaciers to the Ecuadorian Amazon. The work has evolved from his awe of nature, which sparked his investigation of it in his earlier work that exemplified landscape and natural forms embodied in abstracted, atmospheric, sometimes ethereal, settings. 

McDowell’s newest paintings shift from an earlier engagement with the viewer to bring attention to the loss of nature and wilderness to an epitaph to the vanishing life forms caused by the reckless use of resources. He now elevates the narrative, directing the topic beyond the loss of nature to address also the social, political and environmental repercussions of our behavior across a wider spectrum in paintings that act as a playground of narratives, admonishments and warnings drawn from art history, news media, current events and timeless parables. 

No longer just an elegy to nature having viewers imagine new worlds taking place, Panel Paintings: Geometries and Allegories, 2021, display the relationship between history and the time we’re living in with each piece alluding to a historical painting while incorporating McDowell’s sustained environmental imagery. 

To create these works, McDowell needed to re-invent his medium, changing his approach to painting and image making. In all of McDowell’s work there is great evidence for a love of process. In his most recent work this is evident to the viewer. McDowell's time in the studio is 

ever-changing. He takes time to implement new and compelling ideas into the pieces he’s working on and in particular to this show, each work contains elements that allude to a historical painting or print while incorporating McDowell’s particular style of re-imagined associations. A fascination with wood and its history, which he is tracing back to the 1500’s also has to do with his true love for the beauty of paint, some of his own making, and encaustic. Wood panels are reminiscent of wax paintings, which imitate historic painting methods that McDowell is drawn to. 

In the current body of paintings viewers are prompted to explore a new reality. The picture plane is employed as a portal to a surreal geometry that subverts the rules of linear perception and defines a new logic. He has employed layers of veneer, objects, planes and landscapes to compose non-static, purposeful images that contain both obvious and hidden meaning. Trompe l’oeil juxtaposed with concrete reality creates a visual puzzle that is both delightful to engage with and is a metaphor of our existential struggle of reality versus illusion. 

Also in the exhibition, McDowell’s presents a series of oil portraits on wood panels. McDowell states “I began painting this series of faces as a way of maintaining a continuum of subject as I explored a wide range of process and intuitive strategies with paint. Each panel is an iteration of the last but only in that it is a portrait; beyond that there is no repetition of form, quality, image or theme from painting to painting. Hopefully they should be experienced as a collective body so comparisons and contrasts can be examined.” 

The portraits act as one culminating narrative, while the panel paintings stand alone.

Born in Texas in 1953, Timothy McDowell received an MFA degree from the Universityof Arizona in 1981. He is a professor of printmaking and drawing at Connecticut Collegein New London. McDowell has exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries, museums and biennials. Collections include The Metropolitan Museum of Art Print and Drawing collection, The University of Iowa Museum of Art, The New Mexico Museum of Art, the Tucson Museum of Art, Fidelity Investments, J.P. Morgan, A. G. Rosen Collection, The Benziger Family Winery Collection and others. Exhibitions include the Nicolaysen Museum of Art, Casper, WY, the Museum of Modern Art of Jacksonville, FL, the Phoenix Museum of Art, Phoenix, AZ, the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, the 5th Cuenca Biennial of Painting, Cuenca, Quito and Guayaquil, Ecuador, and the Biennale Internazionale dell’Arte Contemporanea (Florence, Italy). His work is in numerous private, corporate and museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art Prints and Drawings Collection, NY. Timothy McDowell resides in Noank, Connecticut, and has been an instructor at Connecticut College since 1981.

Timothy McDowell 

Panel Paintings: Geometries and Allegories, 2021

Opening October 21 5-7:30 / Artist Talk 6 PM 

Contact for inquiries: 

Marcia Wood 

404-827-0030 

info@marciawoodgallery.com 

https://www.marciawoodgallery.com/ 

Marcia Wood Gallery 

764 Miami Circle NE, Ste 150, Atlanta, GA 30324

Tuesday - Friday 11:00 - 5:00 

Saturday 12:00 - 5:00