August 2023
Tim Braden
Pinks, Reds and Geranium (detail), 2021, © Tim Braden, courtesy of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York
Simon Grant speaks with the master colorist about early artistic influences, the importance of travel to his practice, and painting in both abstract and figurative modes.
Tim Braden (b. 1975 Perth, Scotland) is an artist who works in both painting and sculpture, incorporating various techniques and materials across media. His oeuvre reflects a comprehensive reflection on the schism between abstraction and figuration. Braden’s work ranges from tight figuration to total abstractions, in which he dissolves recognizable images and reconstructs them within his simultaneously precise and aerial style. His vivid and colorful works derive from a wide range of stylistic influences, including French Impressionism, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Sonia Delaunay, and Roberto Burle Marx. He further looks to Maghrebian textile, furniture, architecture, gardening, and applied arts to inspire and inform his practice, thus contributing to a modernist effort to blur the once strictly imposed boundaries between the so-called “fine arts” and craft traditions.
Many artists I have talked to over the years have described how art came into their lives at an early age. Some had epiphanies in their local art gallery, while others remembered seeing a work of art in a book or, more recently, online. What was your first art experience?
My parents always encouraged me to paint and draw. We grew up in a small village in the country, and from the age of five or six, I would enter my little paintings, of a bunch of flowers or my cat into the art competition at the village show, alongside the prize turnips and flower displays. That was about as sophisticated as it got. At home, there were plenty of books on art, but all fairly conventional for the time, with titles like Masterpieces from the Uffizi or The Impressionists.
Were there any artists in your family that you were aware of?
There was an avant-garde art side to the family that I only came to appreciate later, once I was an artist myself. My father’s aunt Nora [Braden] was a potter who worked alongside Bernard Leach in St Ives. My father’s sister is also an artist and filmmaker. Patrick Heron was a cousin on my mother’s side and encouraged my grandfather to collect early post-Impressionists. Not much was made of any of this in our household, but I think it helped foster the idea that art was a real endeavor and a worthwhile way to spend your life. It was never dismissed as a hobby or something extra-curricular.
Abstract 410 (Powis Terrace), 2016, oil on canvas, 27 x 33.5 inches
You met Patrick Heron before you became an artist. What effect did meeting him have on you?
In 1991, when I was about sixteen, my parents organized a visit to Heron’s studio. I had never encountered anyone like him—a big man with his rough fisherman’s sweater offset with a fuchsia scarf, walking around his home, Eagle’s Nest, on the north Cornish coast. The house was filled with mid-century Scandinavian furniture alongside his abstract paintings on the walls and set against his spectacular boulder-strewn Azalea garden. I had never seen (or, more accurately, never noticed) colors like the pinks, purples, and violets that he was using in his paintings. The experience of meeting him was an epiphany. I realized that I could happily spend my life doing what he did, pushing colors around a large canvas.
I have been thinking about him again recently, researching his father, Tom Heron. He ran a print and textile company called Cresta Silks that worked with artists like Paul Nash, Cedric Morris, and Graham Sutherland in the 1950s.
Burle Marx, 2016, watercolor and acrylic on canvas, 73 x 65 inches
Other artists made an early strong impression on you, such as Matisse, particularly his fauvist works that you saw at The Hermitage while studying in Russia in the mid-1990s. But you have a wider interest in color.
I have always been interested in color charts, how colors affect and change depending on what is put next to them, and how my mood can be altered by certain color combinations. In my early twenties, I was more interested in light—specifically lens flare and direct bright sunlight, views through car windscreen with light bouncing off the asphalt—so dazzling that it knocks out all the color. Or that monochrome blue hazy light when you open your eyes after sleeping in the sun. That affected my palette for a while.
When I was in Iceland several years ago, I bought a range of paints that were used to decorate Russian datchas—a pale dirty duck egg, a brighter blue, some greens, and a yellow tone—and painted a 350-meter long snow fence set in the epic and barren landscape outside Reykjavik. It was an experiment to see if one set of colors that are grounded in certain geographical cultures can be transplanted into another. More recently, I have been drawn to using flatter, brighter colors.
blue fence, 2006, oil-based household paint on wooden fence, approximately 1 x 350 meters
“I have always been interested in color charts, how colors affect and change depending on what is put next to them, and how my mood can be altered by certain color combinations.”
interior—greens, blues and turquoise, 2022, oil on panel, 20 x 16 inches
You have traveled abroad a lot, and it seems that these experiences have been very important in shaping some of your art over the years.
Artist residency programs have been one of the most rewarding things—being able to work in another country, sharing a studio space with other artists, where there is always a shared language and sensibility. There is a simple pleasure in arriving in an empty white space with minimal equipment, usually just a desk and chair, and making it your own for a month (or a few years). It is so liberating to have the time to paint and fill those spaces with work, images, and objects that I’ve created, usually without any expectations or need to be working towards a particular exhibition. Through residency programs, I’ve had studios in St Petersburg, Los Angeles, Marseille, Amsterdam, Belo Horizonte, and Algiers.
I love the transition from the initial dislocation of living and working in a different country (particularly when it is also an unfamiliar language) and how quickly that can become familiar and a home and ends up as part of your biography. The idea that you can be creative with your own life story has been a revelation. It has sustained me for a long time. I keep fragments of work made in these places all around me in my current London studio.
El Universal, 2022, oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches
You make work that is both abstract and figurative. How do you decide which?
The priority is to get away from the terror of the blank canvas and find a rich seam of subject matter that can sustain me for a few weeks or months in the studio. As I did for my recent show, El Universal, at Ryan Lee Gallery in New York, I usually start a group of work researching somewhere or a subject through found imagery or my own photographs from my travels. Like most artists, I have a large archive of imagery, books, and other little objects that float around the studio, and the more persuasive of these tend to find their way into a painting somehow.
There is always a certain amount of panic at the start of a cycle of paintings, and naturally, a lot of false starts. Then once I have gone a certain distance and filled my studio with a sense of a place and established some parameters, I can relax a little and expand.
I try to imagine a viewer wandering into an exhibition for the first time. A landscape painting helps give a sense of orientation, a large abstract establishes a color palette, paintings of figures populate the show, suggest a narrative, and help zoom into a subject matter. I often think about the structure of a novel or a film to create an exhibition, to locate a body of work in a particular landscape or genre. For example, for the recent Ryan Lee gallery show, there was a large painting of Anni Albers looking at the ruins of Monte Albán—the large pre-Columbian archaeological site in southern Mexico. In the painting, a wall of steps behind her is abstracted into areas that were reminiscent to me of her tapestries.
If there is a narrative to a show or a story I want to tell, there needs to be a degree of figuration in the paintings to get that subject matter across, but I also find that I simply can’t paint the same way every day—my handwriting depends on my mood. Some days I can paint in watercolor, then I forget how to do it or lose that kind of ability to focus for a while, so it might become a large gestural abstract kind of day.
I don’t know if I’m wary of being too illustrational or just too self-conscious to tackle subjects head-on, but I find an oblique approach to narrative works for me—the writers’ mantra, ‘show don’t tell,’ is a useful guide. Sometimes I make ‘orphan’ paintings that don’t seem to relate to anything else I’m doing in the studio, then a few months or even years later, I can insert them into a new group of work around a particular theme and help expand it. I like the idea of paintings being props to suggest a story and an exhibition looking like it might be made by more than one artist.
Anni in Mexico 2, 2022, oil on canvas, 75 x 63 inches
“There is always a certain amount of panic at the start of a cycle of paintings, and naturally, a lot of false starts. Then once I have gone a certain distance and filled my studio with a sense of a place and established some parameters, I can relax a little and expand.”
The Architects (Anni and Josef Albers), 2017, oil on canvas, 67 x 83 inches
So, what is the approach and process for the more abstract works? Is there a relation to figuration?
Once I have established a subject and there are some figurative works around me in the studio, I become more familiar with a subject and own it a bit. I’ll feel a bit freer to start inventing. Sometimes this might be taking areas of paintings and enlarging these ‘found’ abstract compositions into paintings. I am always jealous of abstract artists who can improvise on the canvas. For me, it is more a process of discovering paintings, or fragments of color combinations, within my own work. Small areas that look like paintings that I wish I’d made, cropped just at the point where they stop being recognizable. The challenge is to keep that spontaneity of the descriptive mark or brushstroke when translating it into a large-scale abstract work.
Beyond your explorations of memory, observation, fictions, and art historical narratives, your paintings seem to reflect a delicate balance between painterly inquisitiveness and a sense of balanced optimism, all of which can be a delicate balancing act, no?
Yes, it is, and it seems to get harder. The best I can do is keep exploring and focus, hope for those little epiphanies, and record that feeling of discovering something new, and hopefully, if you surprise yourself, some of that will translate for a viewer. I’m not someone who can work on a particular painting for months—I’d only ever make it as a short story writer if I was a writer—but I am trying to stay with a subject for longer and hope the patterns between what comes out of the studio reveal themselves.
Tim Braden
El Universal
Ryan Lee
New York
March 30—May 13, 2023
Tim Braden received his MA from Ruskin School of Fine Art at Oxford University and attended Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. He lives and works in London, England. His work has been exhibited at a solo booth at the Armory Show in 2020. He has further been exhibited at The Corn Hall, England; Frac, France; Henry Moore Institute, England; Baibakov Art Projects, Russia; Gemeentemuseum, The Netherlands; Goethe Institute, New York, NY; Schloss Ringenberg, Germany; Van Gogh Museum, The Netherlands; Museum Van Loon, The Netherlands; Hamburger Bahnhof, Germany; and Kunstnernes Hus, Norway.
His work is held in the collections of the Ashmolean Museum, UK; Cazenove Collection, UK; Lazards Collection, UK; Nederlandse Bank (Dutch National Bank), Amsterdam; Pembroke College, UK; Walsall Museum and Art Gallery, UK, and the Zabludowicz Collection, UK.
Simon Grant is a curator and writer. His most recent exhibitions are Santi Alleruzzo: Night and Day at SpazioA, Pistoia, Italy (2023), The Moth and The Thunderclap at Modern Art, London (2023), and Not Without My Ghosts: The Artist As Medium at Hayward Gallery Touring, co-curated with Lars Bang Larsen and Marco Pasi (2021-2022).