Tim Meagher

British artist. Has exhibited in solo and group shows, in museums and galleries nationally and internationally. Now living in Romanshorn, Switzerland. Initially, because both my parents painted, I wanted to do something else. I decided to be a writer and at 17 won second prize in the Stroud Festival of Literature poetry competition. This led me to study English and American Literature at Bristol University. But the visual arts were in my blood and in my early 20's I started making sculptural objects, mostly at that time using 3-4mm thick saddlery and harness leather which I used to get from Conolly's warehouse in London.

I would mould form stitch and colour it. I spent 1983/84 at Corwainers College in London experimenting and developing techniques. While there I spent many free hours drawing and being inspired by the objects in The Museum of Mankind (now sadly gone) and have since continued my love of "tribal art" and indiginous "World Art".

Soon, these turned into paintings, where in many of them the dominant themes turned out to be an attempt to express tensions and relationships between nature and technology and between our material and spiritual dimensions. I developed a method of using bookbinders board, which I could cut to the required dimensions, building the painting out of pieces so that I could alter the size and format of the painting as I worked.

It was a way of stirring things up in the work as I could move parts of the painting around, adding and discarding images, and finding interesting chance encounters. When the work felt right, then the pieces were glued to thin ply, finished and braced. Many of the paintings ended up with the piece of board I'd used as a palette inlayed into the painting.
In 1987/88 I was awarded a major bursary by South West Arts, and in 1989 was invited to give a solo show at Fremantle Arts Centre as part of the Perth International Festival of the Arts in Western Australia. From this I was offered teaching and residencies, first in Western Australia, and then in the east in Canberra where I was artist-in-residence at Canberra School of Art where I also had a solo show. Altogether my wife Romy and I spent a couple of years in the country before travelling on to New Zealand where we spent nearly three years. While there I had a couple of solo shows in galleries in Auckland, and a residency at Waikato Polytechnic in Hamilton.
In 1998 I was invited to give a solo exhibition at the Schloss Arbon in northern Swizerland, and have continued living, working and exhibiting in Switzerland since. In 2007 I had a solo show in Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum in the U.K. titled "Undersong", and a calalogue of the same name, was published in English and German to accompany it.
This exhibition was a kind of watershed for me and I needed a fresh start so I went back to my roots, painting portraits, mostly of friends, musicians, scenes, objects. This has led me to a deeper appraisal of painters like Velasquez, Rembrandt and Frans Hals, among many others, where the magic lies primarily in the mysterious relationships and differences between the painted image, which takes on its own reality, and that of the subject depicted; not an illustration, but a distilled essence being sought ultimately through intuition and imagination. Francis Bacon called it "the mystery of appearance". Throughout this time I have continued making objects, using combinations of various techniques and materials. The "Thiepval Wood" paintings are an ongoing series inspired by reading Martin Middlebrook's "The First Day on the Somme". The nearby soldiers used this wood for "relaxation", a smoke and a brew of tea before taking part in one of the most disastrous and bloody battles in British history.
In 2014/15, 12 of these paintings were exhibited at the Stadarchiv Museum in Friedrichshafen Germany in commemoration and to mark the centenary of the First World War. Recently I have begun to set my poetry into the paintings. To me the physical act of writing is like drawing, so the words become an integral part of the wo Less.