Tim Price
Paint Is The Crystal Ball
18 September – 11 October
Tim’s whimsical mark making, and almost fantastical depictions of interior and exterior scenery, first clicked for me mid-conversation about the title of this upcoming exhibition. Standing within the cacophony of studio materials—Pick’s peanut butter jars crusted with dry acrylic, a smattering of brushes—I was enveloped by the thrum of Tim’s wondrous, romantic and improvised representations of the ‘artist’s self- surrender’. Selected from various points in his career one evening at his studio on Parramatta Road, these paintings blend the interrelated realms of meditation, edification and aesthetic enjoyment.
Paint is the Crystal Ball marks these moments, carrying across Tim’s practice an improvised lyricism that narrates a romantic gesture of the artists’ self-surrender: to the emotive, metaphysical, and bodily real. Each painting blends the interrelated realms of ‘meditation, edification and aesthetic enjoyment’. These narrate a romantic and improvised representations of our interior and exterior worlds. Tim has noted, what he ‘sees, thinks and paints’ are in constant interaction.
His practice indulges both stylistic and thematic narrative, sprawling across figuration, landscape, abstraction, and painting from life. Subject matter emerges from the nuances of contemporary experience, his interest in history—particularly the 20th century—and the reworking of found imagery.
In one of the smaller interior settings, for example, Tim has reconfigured the objects of the everyday, within a world of colour, pattern and tone. The interrelated playful mark making of Tim’s application of colour, tone and patterning simultaneously creates an obvious or discernible ‘object’, that is equally then, ‘veiled’ by the rest of the composition. A vessel on a small table becomes reminiscent of vessel that would hold a plume à épousseter within an interior by Edourd Vuillard, conceived in ochre, mustard and very dark umber. And the woven green, custard and cream pattern of a textile cloth may be seen in the form of a bed, or a rug. He plays with spatial depth by juxtaposing the negative space of the ochre and umber drapery with the woven pattern of a textile, depicted in green, mustard and cream. The geometric woven pattern presents loosely to carpet a structure beneath it, whether that is intended to be a floor, or a bed is not clear.
Tim holds a BFA (ANU, 2007) and PhD (ANU, 2018), and has exhibited in Canberra, Tasmania, Melbourne and Sydney since 2007. I first encountered his simultaneously figurative and abstracted landscapes at the ANU Drill Hall Gallery, in Projector (2008). Hung in the office where I worked weekend shifts, I spent hours tracing new indices of meaning. Over six years, I returned repeatedly to a small detail: a knitted sweater draped over a chair, a nod to the artist, and a metal caster fixed to the leg of a Queen Anne table in graphite. Delicate, barely there, yet it held my gaze.
I hope these do the same for you.
Teah Linnegar, B.A., 2025
Darlinghurst, Eora
References:
Who, if not We, should at least try to imagine the future of all this? Published by the Dutch Ministry for Foreign Affairs. 2004.
The Occult in Art, by Owen S. Rachleff
