An art instructor once told me he rejected my thinking because I don’t paint background to foreground. I usually paint the light in last, the white clouds and dabs of light piercing through the foliage. While the criticism gave me pause to contemplate the organic process of my painting style, it only served to redouble my impulse to capture light at the end of the process. While the forest is a three-dimensional entity with an undisputed foreground, middle ground and background (ever changing, based on our position in relation to it), my paintings take place on a two dimensional panel, flattening one perspective to fit the flat area, and thus creating a limited impression, a specific viewpoint. I think it was Claude Monet who said that when he painted a sunset, he didn’t paint “a cloud”, but he painted pink in just such a size and shape compared to this patch of blue next to it. Our eye does the rest. With paint, our eye creates the illusion of depth, when really the positive and negative space exist on the exact same plane. In fact, the negative space often (usually) encroaches upon and overlaps the positive space, defining the edge in what I consider a necessary relationship. I wouldn’t do it differently. Taking the criticism of the instructor to heart would mean that anything “further back” in the painting could never be touched again without obliterating everything else further “forward” and starting the painting over again. It’s a harsh sort of fundamentalism that I would never adopt in my own painting. That interplay of foreground overlapping background in one spot, and background overlapping foreground in another, gives the work a certain feel that is an intrinsic characteristic of my paintings.

Artwork by Tim Young, Design by Madesyn Kimball Drive Thru TV

Acrylic on wood… 2 panels, each 34″ x 47″

Gunflint Pines. 42″ x 48″. Acrylic.

My favorite iPhone App is called Hipstamatic. “Digital photography never looked so analog.” This amazing app replicates the look and feel of those plastic cameras I remember from my childhood. The shots have an unpredictable beauty, because there are a variety of film types, lenses and flashes available. If you shake the camera while shooting, you can get a random combination for even more of a surprise. And it only costs $1.99. Crazy. Beautiful.

A year or two ago, my friend Jess took pictures of Madeline and me, and I really wanted to do just what hipstamatic does. So I took some of those crisp, perfect pictures into photoshop and desaturated them, blurred parts, created lens flares, cropped them to square, and even added the white border with the retro style date… Well, hipstamatic does all that for me. I obviously wasn’t the only one with the idea, and I’m glad someone with the know-how created this application.

These are a few of my favorite shots so far. But I’ve only had the app for 2 days. Want to see more? Keep checking back here.