Editor’s note: Airstream will host a fine art invitational exhibit of landscape art, May 31-June 5, at its headquarters in Jackson Center. This is one in a series of stories that will profile the artists whose work will be shown.
SIDNEY — When Tim Horn visits the Airstream Fine Art Invitational later this spring, he’ll be coming home.
Home to Ohio. The Fairfax, California, painter was born in Yellow Springs. His mother still lives there. Horn is eager to spend time in his native state and to paint it.
“I haven’t yet painted in Ohio,” he said by phone recently. “I did a snow scene of Springfield recently (from photographs).” Horn doesn’t usually paint snow into his pictures, but adding slushiness to the Springfield scene didn’t feel alien to him.
“It really felt like part of my roots,” he said.
Horn left Yellow Springs to study at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York City. He graduated in 1984 and lived in the city for 11 years before heading west.
“I had to get out of New York,” he said. So, he set out for San Francisco, where friends had assured him he’d find graphic design work.
“I spent two months driving across country in my Alpha Romeo convertible, taking black-and-white photographs with an antique, medium-format camera,” he said. He still has the photographs.
When he made the decision to become a full-time fine artist, Horn signed up for a weekly class in landscape painting. He went where the class went and painted what the class painted — mostly pure landscapes en plein air, on location. But it wasn’t the kind of art he really wanted to make.
“I love to paint structures: buildings, cars,” he said. “After a year and a half, I decided ‘I have to stop class and do what I want to do.’ I was drawn to try to paint the intensity of the California sun.”
What intrigued him about structures was the clear division they gave him between light and shadow. He marvels, he said, at the light and color and then starts to dissect where light and color come from.
“Like all good artists, he’s absolutely tied to the light,” said Remak Ramsay, a Manhattan-based Broadway and movie actor and well respected collector of American art. Ramsay owns more than a dozen Horn artworks and has donated Horn’s and other’s paintings to museums.
“He can paint stuff at high noon and make it interesting or those long shadows full of nostalgia, the last great flare of life at the end of the day. Tim knows how to capture that,” Ramsay said. Capturing light and its effects is one reason Horn enjoys meeting the challenge of putting Airstream trailers into his paintings.
“He loves the reflection. It’s light and how it bounces off (the trailer),” Ramsay said.
“I’ve been painting Airstreams for more than 10 years,” Horn said. “They’re some of my most popular paintings. I remember the first time. It had just been polished. It had this mirror finish. I painted it for a show in Marin (California).” The show’s organizer wanted to use Horn’s Airstream painting on a postcard promoting the show. Horn had chosen a different painting, but the organizer insisted.
“It was wildly popular,” Horn said. Another time, when he was standing near one of his Airstream paintings, a viewer said, “You are the king of gleam.”
“And she marched away. I thought I should put that on my business card,” he laughed.
The difficulty for Horn in painting the iconic trailers is finding them in good settings. He’d like to own one, so he could put it where he likes, where it would make the best painting.
“And in future, when my kids are grown, let it be my painting studio,” he said. Horn and his wife are the parents of two sons, one in high school and one in middle school. Because Horn works in a home-based studio and his wife has a full-time job, Horn handles cooking, grocery shopping, “sports management” and other household chores.
“It’s very difficult to be a parent and a painter at the same time,” he said. Once the kids are off to school in the morning, Horn takes a quick bike ride and works in his studio until about 3 p.m.
“That’s when I do soccer, lacrosse, dinner,” he said. While he doesn’t paint during family vacations — he is on vacation, after all — he’s always looking at the world around him with an artist’s eye.
“He has an absolutely flawless eye,” Ramsay said. “He has great, great draftsmanship. He can capture proportion perfectly. It’s always true. Even more sensational to me is his color sense. He can catch exactly the color. I love Tim’s handling of paint. He has a wonderful feeling for paint. It’s so lavishly slapped on that it’s like icing on the cake. You want to lick it off.”
“I like a painterly quality,” Horn admitted. He also likes shapes.
“I always approach a painting when I’m developing composition in an abstract way. I look at shapes more than anything else. I love including utility poles. It breaks up the sky into two shapes. I paint clouds for the same reason. (In Maine), you see the ocean, which is one shape, and the sky and there are these little islands. (My paintings have) a shape-driven composition,” Horn said.
There is also a sense of motion in many of his works, as though the viewer has caught but a glimpse of the passing scene as he rides by in a car or on a train. Others hint at the nearby, but unpictured, presence of people.
“Someone described my paintings as the moment between moments,” Horn said. “There’s a suggestion that someone was just there or is going to be there again soon.”
Not just a studio painter, Horn works on small paintings on location, to capture light before it changes. Every six months or so, he begins to explore new directions for his work. Recently, he tackled the challenge of looking directly into the sun. He calls the result his sun flare paintings.
“The sun is sort of burning away something. The first one was so difficult — what the camera sees, what I see, the values. Now I’ve done a dozen of them, so I’m on to something else,” he said. One goal he has set for himself is to make larger paintings and to develop what he says are more personal paintings.
“A lot of the time, I’m trying to satisfy a theme for a group show. I’d like to try to squash that little voice in my head and make paintings no matter what they’re about,” he said. “It’s that solitude to be completely immersed in that art-making process that allows you to dig deeper (into yourself and your art).”
Horn, like other painters interviewed for this series, has a hard time finding words to express why he’d like to own what he’d choose if he could own anything ever made. He’d take something by Joaquin Sorolla.
“I can’t describe in words how wonderful his paintings are. He captures the light like nobody else and with a very painterly quality. His paintings are abstract in design and they’re all about light. He created them in such a fresh, loose, painterly way. They are just unmatched,” Horn said.
Horn is admired as a teacher almost as much as he is for his artworks. According to Ramsay, students travel from as far away as California to participate in workshops Horn gives in Maine. He’ll teach a workshop in Yellow Springs — his first in Ohio — when he is home for the Airstream show.
