Ben Timpson's passion
A dead Monarch butterfly was on his light table. A whole jar on them on the shelf.
"Here's my net!" local artist Ben Timpson exclaims. He's known for taking organic found objects and making art: feathers into trees, a woman's hair out of scrap metal.
In response to a question about a list of materials, he asks, "Are you ready to write?" and spouts off turnip, lint, wheat, grasshopper, grape skin, orchid and, not all that surprisingly, beta fish tail.
His process started during a "dark time" when he was in the habit of burning his old 35mm film.
"I created 'Goodnight 35,' " which is the title of his website and his book, "when photography went from analog and chemical into the digital photo age. I took color theory classes in college, and then the next semester, the class didn't exist anymore."
Clippings of the old, burned film now make their way into Timpson's art. One piece of flying blackbirds shows the progression of clarity in photography.
His scenes are set into resin disks, which almost look like amber hockey pucks. ("Sometimes I chuck them across the room. You always have to test them.") And the resin disk is set in stone. Timpson was looking for a way to one, display the resin disks, and two, make his art more archival, so he now drills and sands his scenes into an upright stone base. "All the Venus of Willendorf statues were brought over, and they are now being found by the hundreds. They serve no purpose; everyone's trying to figure out why they exist, but they survived. I wanted my art to be something like that, that you can move around with you."
One scene is double-sided. In "Scale" both a woman and man hold scales. "They're weighing their hearts against the other." In "Narcissist" a man stares at his reflection.
He's also made prints of the statues for the more traditional art collector, but the depth, the detail is not quite the same on canvas.
At his solo show on Friday at SCOOP studios, the statues and prints will be for sale, and he's made sure they're affordable. "My grandfather died recently, and he was, like me, a craftsman. We went down into his basement, and there's all this stuff. I don't want a bunch of stuff around for just me to look at for years. If someone else wants it, they can have it."
