Tim Cross, “Night Flowers”

By Matthew Kangas

April 6, 2024

Exhibition continues through April 20, 2024

Koplin Del Rio Gallery, Seattle, Washington

Tim Cross, “Night Flowers,” 2023, gouache, silk and acrylic photo-transfer, 16 1/2 x 10 1/2”

All images courtesy of the artist and Koplin Del Rio Gallery

Tim Cross is a well-kept secret. Despite ten previous solo shows (plus two in Chicago), he remains largely unknown outside the Seattle area. And despite various residencies throughout Washington State and one in Wyoming, Cross, now 54, arrived at a career standstill, far behind where an artist of his talent should be by now. Could it be because he’s been teaching at Edmonds Community College and was curator of exhibitions at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport for ten years? Regardless, it’s never too late to discover a new artist; sometimes middle-aged artists can become “emerging,” too, if only to a wider audience in search of unusual and underappreciated talent.

Given that unpromising context, Cross’ new paintings are his most imaginative and mature to date, serving notice that his time may have arrived.

Tim Cross, “Breakwater,” 2024, gouache, silk and acrylic photo-transfer, 16 x 19 1/2”

Titled “Night Flowers,” each painting is an enchanting and mysterious riff on the theme. The paintings, all done within the last year, are all much smaller than past work, more intimate and densely packed with painterly effects that conceal and reveal aspects of nature or gardening one would find on a stroll in the park after dark or in one’s own unkempt backyard. Sixteen gouaches on silk are mounted on wood with photo-collaged elements. In addition there are several elongated painted “sticks” which lean against the gallery walls and interrupt the visual flow of the plaques with their floor-bound presence. Their display suggests more experimentation than confident aesthetic fulfillment, but is a welcome shift within the long line of pictures wrapping the gallery walls.

“Night Flowers” insists on close-in viewing in the same way a contemporary poem by Jorie Graham or John Ashbery requires close attention. One gets in the groove, however, of staring, peering and gazing along with scanning each picture’s surface for hints of perspective, depth or agitated surface covering.

Tim Cross, “Blossoms,” 2024, gouache, silk and acrylic photo-transfer, 23 1/2 x 17 1/2”

In a refreshing departure from current ecology art, none of this imagery seems to have been drawn from outdoor sketching or breathless en plein air crypto-impressionism. Instead, these glimpses into individually concocted visions of nature are all different from one another: shapes, leaves, forms, colors, gestures, and spatters diverge to form each separate peep-hole. Nothing is framed like a conventional landscape composition; everything seems to careen across the picture plane, colliding with differing petals, leaves, branches and the occasional pond or fence. Nocturnal worlds of nature are revealed as if through the momentary pointing of a flashlight, focused on particular areas of a flowerbed or tree trunk. It’s an aesthetic that proposes that it is all too complicated to grasp at once, too full of material tricks and gimmicks to subside into a comfortable, coalescing image.

The best of these read as either close-ups or distant aerial views. Cross has become a master at confusing perception, perhaps the greatest connecting theme within this body of work. With little or no repetition of composition despite the tightly repetitive size, the pictures show off giant blossoms, as in “Fall Flower” and “Flower Thicket,” the only two that form a complementary pair. “Pink” and “Blue” scatter rose petals and white blooms, falling downward as if in the aftermath of an Autumn wind. The eponymous “Night Flowers” and “Overgrown Yard” are more literal, with drawing playing a bigger role to delineate leaves and stems, even a recurring fence. In “Night Thicket,” the fence and pond reappear beneath a shower of glistening leaves. “Laurel and Fence” is the most literal depiction here, with the brushwork thrusting forward toward us, bursting off the otherwise flat picture plane that struggles throughout the show for dominance, resistant to the expected perspective of conventional landscapes.

Tim Cross, “Laurel and Fence,” 2024, gouache, silk and acrylic photo-transfer, 23 1/2 x 17 1/2”

At the far end, abstraction wins the battle, with both a diminished naturalism and an all-over composition that recalls the best of Mark Tobey’s “Meditation” series: shimmering yellows and purples in “Roadside Blossoms” and the scattered droplets of a whirlpool in “Portal” command attention. Unlike Tobey, Cross employs an extraordinarily wide palette, from reds and pinks to pale yellows, blues and grays. The larger size of his earlier works, which look deep into thickets and forests, is replaced by an intimacy of inspection that rewards us many times over.

Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas.