If you were born in 1983, by the time you were literate your mum or dad might have bought their first baby Macintosh, by the time you were ten the internet had happened and Pac-men were old hat, when you were 15 you were using Google to do your homework, and when you were at Uni your lecturers were worrying about online plagiarism at the same time they were teaching you about postmodernity. With the web, google, facebook, youtube, flickr, and the wireless library your access to images had doubled every few years of your life. Printmedia echo’d the image explosion. And by some anachronistic twist of fate you discovered you wanted to be a painter…

The story of painting became four dimensional in a new way. Images came to you in sequences, sometimes with an historical thread, sometimes structured by their medium, mostly as a matrix with a high degree of random association. Mainly of photographic origin, overwhelmingly mediated, usually modified, images came flooding at you whether you wanted it or not – and rarely via art’s history. In its simplest sense, this is a four dimensional experience, as you experience your senses being battered by the mediated character of the 21st century image-world. But for a painter – as the producer of even more images – the four dimensions of experience have another potentiality, building on the lines and patches of paint as they are made to interact to create graphic and colouristic illusions of form and space.

The unique thing about the painted image is that it carries its own material history, its intrinsic depth, and in every micro-narrative of its surface can be read the substance of its application. The reworking of source imagery involves the arrest of the passage of time, and the creation of the new time-frame of the painterly image, all alluding to the experience of time in a quite different directions.

Tim Price’s paintings pull images from everywhere, and he crunches them together, both side-by-side and layered on top of one another. In this process he interrupts their original temporal flow, and the historical logic of their origins, while at the same time making new conjunctions of image to image, and image to matter, the material of their being painted. Sometimes the paint itself takes over, and the representation of form and illusion are arrested, left incomplete. The substance of the painting itself – paint – becomes its subject matter. This has strangely disruptive affects: harsh and grotesque images and events are interrupted by the artist’s own processes and meditations and the effects these collected subjects have on his day to day life and identity. In their simplest sense, a collection of his paintings is like a non-linear diary – but in another sense, they draw the viewer into a complex set of shared experiences.

Come and see, or take a look in the side-bar galleries…

(The paintings above are: 07 family, 2 panels, 402 x 300, and Interplanetary ruin, 2 panels, 400 x 300)