Rising Stars: Meet Tim Hower of Santa Ana

Today we’d like to introduce you to Tim Hower.

Hi Tim, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
Timothy Hower was born in 1967 in Omaha, Nebraska, where his father, Walter, was a business manager and his mother, Rita, a homemaker to seven children. He took his first oil painting lesson from his grandmother while in high school. Hower continued his painting efforts at the University of Nebraska, Omaha and majored in painting. During his Junior year in his painting program at UNO, he was selected as a scholarship recipient to The Yale Summer School of Music and Art in Norfolk, Connecticut; there he studied painting, drawing and printmaking for a summer semester.
After he graduated in 1991, he went on to study painting in the MFA program at the University of California at Berkeley. The faculty included Christopher Brown, Richard Shaw, Yolanda Lopez, Jim Melchert, and Katherine Sherwood.
At Berkeley, Hower began to seriously contemplate the concept of generational resonance as repetition of form. Through reductive shapes and repeated images and by creating a figure/ground relationship with those components, he hoped to both separate and connect the past and the present. To Hower, this concept meant the tension between both the present image and its distance from the past to which it refers might be concurrently promoted and dissipated while documented in the process as the visual memoire of a painting.
After his graduation Hower moved around the country for six years painting and teaching as an Adjunct Professor, eventually settling in Huntington Beach in 2000. He has taught at several colleges in the Southern California area with the majority of his time spent at Santa Ana College, where he has been teaching painting, drawing, and life drawing since 2007. Today, painting for Hower remains an edification in the formation and perception of memory with themes of familial relationships, childhood nostalgia, and personal forfeiture. Hower currently lives and works in Huntington Beach, California.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Not a smooth road…

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I practice painting as a means of investigation into the nature of perception; a challenge to reexamine memory and personal history; trying to absorb facts, construed fictions, and lost connections, while walking a fine line between representation and pure abstraction. The ongoing concern of that negotiation on canvas prompts me to not only search for meaning and embrace nostalgia within the images, but to also locate concealed metaphors and associations via the enigmatic language of painting.

Most recently, the serial focus of my work is centered on the broad subject of my relationships with family, some appear as formal studies like the activity of bird watching that I shared with my kids. Others, employing construction marking flags indicating meaningful locations in my life that recount events experienced with those close to me. Included in the work are images of traps, bath toys, kites, clothing patterns, post-it notes, Amyloid plaques, malfunctioning communication devices and various themes of forfeiture, thusly becoming a study of memory and place with a reckoning of isolative muteness and loss.

Analagous to the way I remember incidences in my life, I attempt to blur the particulars while animating the more general, ultimately finding content through experimentation rather than forcing what I want to see. Formally, I am interested in repetition of form and reductive shapes and by creating a figure/ground relationship with those components, hope to both separate and connect the past and the present.

I’m very interested in painting as an activity, as much as I am in making images. It is of principal importance for me that the sum of the painting process is visible and evidently embraced. In my studio, painting represents the possibility of finding on canvas the beauty, longing and sentiment with which I see. As I fathom the depths of a painting and examine its surface, creating a visual contingency is more important than a visual certainty and hopefully the exhilaration and insight of discovery reigns. This provisional pictorial field becomes a creative proving ground as I try to identify the grammar and inflection of my daily life and ultimately reveal to myself, in a genuine way, just who I am.

What does success mean to you?
The story of my success was written long ago. Success is my kids loving and respecting me.

Pricing:

• 5000

Contact Info:

• Website: https://timothyhower.com

Image Credits
All images belong to and pictures were taken by Timothy Hower