#sparkchamber 120924 — Tim Forbes
The electricity when something catches your eye — and reaches your soul — is the genesis of #sparkchamber today. Fussfatory’s Social Branding Wizard Sarah Vienot was at the Muir Hotel in Nova Scotia when she discovered multi-disciplinary artist Tim Forbes. “His captivating photos of rocks adorn each doorway, and honestly, they stopped me in my tracks. You can practically taste the salt air of the Atlantic. I feel so connected to the geography of my hometown province when looking at them.” A few days away can bring you right back home.
Based in Nova Scotia, Tim’s work spans painting, sculpture, and photography. After a brief stop at Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, he opened his first graphic design studio in Halifax before moving on to build a successful career in Toronto as an award-winning communication art director for the performing arts, motion picture and television industry, as well as cross-platforms in corporate communications. In 2006, reaching into dimensional areas beyond design, Forbes expanded his practice to include sculpture at an annex studio in a 1920s repurposed rural schoolhouse and the beginning of a transition to fine art.
His artistic vocabulary has evolved to embrace minimalist symbolism in painting, emotive movement in sculpture, and explorations of nature and cultural memory through photography. After career years in Toronto, in 2019 Forbes circled back to his native Nova Scotia to base his international art practice on the shores of the Atlantic.
1.] Where do ideas come from?
Creative ideas are autonomous. Working as a communications designer, project concepts tended to be the on-demand making things look good. With my own art, it’s not not solving that problem, unless it’s a technical one. It then calls on the intuitive.
In working on a new series of paintings for 2025 — the unrealized was implied as a follow up to the last. Exploring studies, there was an instant movement between the pauses to follow into the next and the next. Entitled “Mnemonic.” It implies symbolism, stimulating recollection faster than the speed of light. A smell, a visual, a taste, a texture that clicks your sense of mind.
In the intuitive, I refer to myself as “self-thought” vs self-taught. In his play The Seagull, Chekhov suggests that creativity is often an attempt to seek an alternate reality — one more beautiful, meaningful, or honest than the world one inhabits — the complex relationship between art, reality, and the desire to escape. Certainly, living with my dogs on a hill overlooking the ocean allows me the freedom to move to the altered.
The creative process is a bit like swimming laps — a solitary exercise of repetition, of meditation and trying not to drown in your own thoughts.
2.] What is the itch you are scratching?
You mean that spot in the middle of your mind you can’t reach? …thoughts without borders perhaps.
From childhood I’ve always been creating — moving into alternate worlds. It’s part of the EQ — emotional intelligence.
3.] Early bird or night owl? Tortoise or hare?
I am very connected to the monkey brain, you know that 3:00 invasive subconsciousness? There are pads of paper in every room of the house, the studios, and even my cars, with requisite 5B Steadtler pencils at the ready for the flow of consciousness — brilliant and idiot thoughts as part of the pattern.
A large house, a garage workshop, and a small summer studio up the hill… places to work with occasional time off to town for a barista break. So probably more hare, bounding place to place, doing different things throughout the day from office to kitchen to studio to room to deck until I’m done and need to get horizontal…the new vertical.
Without a doubt, my innate inventive process surfaced at age four. I could spend hours outside squatting with a bucket of water from the hose, a large brush gripped in my hand as I “painted” gestures across the foundation of the house. It was powerful. The unsealed concrete turned dark at my command, then vanished. Without doubt the genesis of a continual inspiration of line and form. Certainly, a lesson on the ephemeral.
I muscle-memory those strokes often when working on a canvas or gestural works on paper.
There’s a visual and physicality to a lot of the work. Just the application of paint can be breathless. It varies by medium. In process, I plot compositions to understand the contiguous relationships of works. Paint application is very thin, requiring assertive commitment to each mark while allowing the canvas texture to show through as part of the materiality. White space collaboratively becomes part of the reductive/additive interplay …positive and negative composition.
Outside of state-of the-art fabrication, sculpture, by contrast, can be purely hands-on and organic. Currently completing a series of 20 works for exhibition as accomplices to the MNEMONIC paintings. In a two-month summer session, entitled FOUND, each work is composed of lost-purpose wood — a unique collection of reclaimed abstract forms, not as talismans, or idols, but rather imagined as portraits.
4.] How do you know when you are done?
I wouldn’t be the first to say “done like dinner.” You know without belaboring the point to third guessing the second guessing. You know when to put down the knife and head to dessert before the work eats you up.
