Bio
Known for his expressive interiors, urban landscapes, portraits and figures, Timothy J. Clark’s watercolors, oils and drawings are in more than twenty museum collections, including the permanent collections at the Smithsonian/National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C, the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, the City Museum of New York, the Library of Congress Works on Paper, and Maine’s Farnsworth Art Museum. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions from Hawaii to Istanbul’s Topkapi Museum.
Clark’s solo exhibition, Timothy J. Clark: Masterworks on Paper, was featured at the Fort Smith Regional Art Museum in Arkansas from December 2018 to March 2019. In addition to Clark’s watercolor paintings depicting images created in locations throughout the Western world, the exhibition included a number of figure paintings and drawings from the Leslie and Betsy Roy collection of twenty-eight artworks recently donated to the Polk Museum of Art in Lakeland, Florida. An interview with Clark, hosted by RAM Director Louis Meluso was made available in a podcast.
Lois Wagner Fine Arts presented Timothy J. Clark’s Poetic Realism: Recent Watercolors at Godel & Co. Fine Art in New York April 1 – 22, 2016. Art historian and former museum director Christopher Crosman wrote of the exhibition, “Clark reminds us that watercolor is about how time looks and feels, special moments that can simultaneously resonate with the past but be brought close to a consoling present through a master’s knowing touch.”
In 2015, Clark’s paintings were celebrated in a solo exhibition, Timothy J. Clark: In the Presence of Sacred Light, at the Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA) in Chicago. Leo J. O’Donovan, S. J., wrote of the work, “Clark probes the creative act itself, the ‘otherness’ it offers, the mystery of appear-ing (not mere appearance) – the sacred”.
A solo exhibition of Clark’s watercolors, Timothy J. Clark, opened at Southern California’s Laguna Art Museum November 4, 2012, and was extended due to popular demand through February 17, 2013. Museum Executive Director Malcolm Warner has written, “Timothy J. Clark stands among the American masters of watercolor, past and present. Along with an uncanny skill at his craft, he has a keen eye for a subject and a sure power of expression. There is no more persuasive argument for watercolor as an art form than a Timothy J. Clark exhibition.”
Curator and art historian Gene Cooper wrote of the artist’s work for his 2011 solo exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art: “Like Rembrandt, Clark’s dramatic light penetrates the rich darkness of the interior core evoking a sense of mysterious presence.” Art historian Lisa E. Farrington, Ph. D., in the 2008 book, Timothy J. Clark, speaks of the artist’s paintings as “diffidently profound documents of human existence,” and she notes his “almost uncanny ability to infuse rudimentary and inert objects…with something akin to a human soul.” Fine Art Connoisseur magazine has called Timothy J. Clark “a living master”.
Clark lectured for several years at Yale University’s Graduate School in Rome, and has taught from the University of Hawaii to the National Academy. An artist-educator, he served as the Interim Executive Director of the Art Students League of New York from February through June, 2017. He maintains studios in Capistrano Beach, California, New York City, and West Bath, Maine.
