Meet Tim Craven, Artist and Founder of the Arborealists Artist Group
"The great thing about trees is their amazing synergy with humanity. (...) They are an amazing symbol of our fragile environment" - Tim Craven
Meet Tim Craven. Painter, Curator and Founder of the Arborealists, an artist group centered around the unifying subject of the tree.
In this special episode of Nature Connections, I record Tim talking to us with great humour and enthusiasm about his life journey from assistant conservation officer in 1980 to Arborealist founder, exhibition curator & artist. He talks to us about :
-Navigating his career in fine art
-His choice to paint trees (spoiler: he found the "verticality" of trees more interesting than the horizontality of landscapes!)
-How humans are innately drawn to patterns (he reveals the secret link to nature in Piet Mondrian's colour block paintings)
-How the Arborealists were formed and their growing popularity for exhibitions in the UK & abroad
-British painter references: John Salt, Paul Nash, Bridget Riley
This is followed by a 15min Q&A where Tim shares with us his thoughts on our connection to nature and how the eco-wave and global pandemic have sparked yearning for nature in our lives.
Here is more about Tim and the Arborealists:
After training in fine art and the conservation of paintings, Tim joined the Southampton City Art Gallery in 1980 as assistance conservation officer. Working up close for over 35 years with one of the finest regional public collections of art, spanning eight centuries, has proved a privileged stimulus for his own art practice. Tim's paintings are informed by a diverse range of styles and ideas from Post-Impressionism, Surrealism and Neo-Romanticism to Op, Systems and Photorealism. Tim Craven formed the Arborealists in 2013, after the critical success of an exhibition named "Under the Green Wood", centered around the unifying subject of the tree. It pictured British Trees, and featured both a historical review of 19th/20th century artists who had occupied themselves drawing and painting trees and tree-landscapes, and 32 contemporary artists who had given trees, forests and woods a special value.