Tim Fawcett is a painter, originally from Cambridge, studied Fine Art at Sunderland and Cambridge with a brief spell of PGCE training at Brighton where he continued to paint and exhibit whilst freelancing as an architectural designer. He moved to the Isle of Wight, UK in 2016, in order to commit to his practice full time.

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Fawcett paints family, but also robots, headphones, fallen angels, and stick figures seemingly as a child might. All of them are made as juvenile as possible, in the vein of the mainstream-shunning art Brutists of the 1950s, purposefully disgorging the orthodoxy drummed into him at university in the 80’s and the following years spent perfecting a loosely gestural and expressive figuration.

Purposely unlearning the skills and creative process, Fawcett approaches his work with a child's free spirit, He embraces error and irregularity as key elements of his oeuvre. He continuously strives to create distance between his adult self and the final result, realising complex concepts and finding meaning and potential in the banal with the freedom of a child to express this.

The speed at which he works often captures the energy, fed by his music which in turn often transposes into a powerful kinetic energy in his painting. His playlist can also inspire the titles of his works. The focus of the painting, often a motif, may take seconds to compose, then may be reconsidered and over-painted entirely and complete by the end of a 45 minute album, achieving a one-hit composition whenever he can.

Fawcett asserts his seemingly chaotic and hurried process, builds on an obsessive amount of internalizing, agonizing, pacing around his studio, and looking into recent obsessions with family relationships and the way they resurface.

After deciding to unlearn what he thought he knew, the artist came out the other side with a renewed commitment to the spontaneity and freedom he recently found whilst teaching adults with learning disabilities.

Inspiration:

“I’m a huge fan of Cy Twombly because of his combination of raw gesture and conceptualism, and Edvard Munch for his depth of emotional intelligence and his ability to harness this in a painting”. Music of course plays an essential part in his process too, both lyrically and sonically.

He is not the first person to needle the my-kid-could-do-that crowd, but he might be the first who does so with his tongue firmly in his cheek, often in the title alone, eg “Good golly Miss Molly and boats”, a line from Ian Dury’s reasons to be cheerful part III, which has absolutely nothing to do with the painting, other than it happened to be playing whilst making the piece and it that it resonated at that moment in time. His work plays with the high-low dynamic, but It’s the raw energetic nature of it that chimes with sincerity.

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Tim Fawcett is based in Isle of Wight, UK and Southern France, his work has been exhibited extensively throughout the UK and shown in Italy and USA.