6
Timothy J. Clark depicts a world illumined by the Divine.
He invokes the sacred through the interplay—or counter-
play—between light and shadows. Clark does not work
on a sublime scale of the grand gesture or on the premise
of the picturesque, but instead, concentrates on the small
moment that causes us all to pause and see what is around
us in the fullest sense.
Clark masters the difficult-to-control medium of
watercolor, bringing us to understand natural light as
elusive—such as in his remembered twilight scene of the
Piazza del Popolo, seen from a terrace in Rome; or when
walking into the Serra Chapel at theMission of San Juan de
Capistrano, California, to find shafts of light illuminating
the altar. His domestic interiors become sacred when he
asks us to become the artist entering a room—to find a
figure, half revealed and mysterious, looking dreamy and
ethereal. Clark identifies great American artists like John
Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, and Edward Hopper as
having a great influence on his style. He also attributes
to Franz Kline and Piet Mondrian the geometry that
underlies his compositions. Clark explains, “I consider
myself a figurative painter rather than a realist.” Personally,
I view Clark’s work as an equation: reality or time + sacred
light = a new reality.
Born in Southern California’s San Diego County—
where the year-round yellow light is relentless and the
sunsets start orange and fade to purple—Clark cannot
help but be viewed in the context of the later 19th-century
landscape artists such as Richard E. Miller, Edgar Payne,
William Wendt, and—most especially—Grandville
Redmond, of whose styleClark’s nocturnes are so redolent.
Although Southern California served as Clark’s training
ground for his understanding of light, he has taken his
eye around the world. Using the same analytics he learned
as a young painter, he continues to break down any given
color into gradations of hue. This color sense is something
that really cannot be taught—it comes naturally to some,
and not at all to others.
The 40 or so works in the exhibition recall the
time 19th-century Grand Tour, when artists, writers,
and tourists—especially Americans—traveled through
Europe and the Near East, recording their impressions
in sketch books and journals. Clark, in effect, works the
same way—each year moving from California to New
York City, Europe, and beyond. He sketches and makes
notes that will serve as prompts for finished watercolors
he works up in his studio. As we know, the quality of light
varies from city to city. I have just returned from Paris
with its blue-tinged light. New York City’s sky is gray,
running to lilac. Southern Italy basks in a golden glow;
Southern California, a tangerine brightness. Clark is able
to express the tones in a city’s light that lends texture to
our impressions and fixes them in time and in our minds.
When painting a figure, Clark creates the sense that it is
a temporary manifestation—born in that moment out of
light and gone as the light shifts.
I am impressed with Clark’s masterly way of handling
paint and his absolute necessity to paint the beauty we
encounter day-to-day. It is wrong to think that the art
world, at any one point in time, is about just onemovement
or emphasis. Artists still have an elegant mastery of their
craft and are concerned with subject matter that can
delight us and lead us to beauty. This is an exhibition to
take one’s time with. Treat it as a summer-day respite; as a
journey in the artist’s mind.
Pamela E. Ambrose
Director of Cultural Affairs
Loyola University Chicago
Timothy J. Clark,
Nessun Dorma
, 2013, watercolor
