Tim Biskup

[The Gorgon]

Here's another Tim Biskup Interview during his "Vapor" show in Germany.

"Vapor" Interview

IThis new body of work is quite a stylistic departure for you both in terms of composition & palette. What's behind the shift? Is this a conscious & premeditated direction or a natural evolution? What motivated you to move away from the flatness & decorative elements of your previous work?

It’s a natural evolution, but there is also a lot of thought behind it. When I find myself getting used to a way of working or using images over & over out of habit I know that it’s time to change it up. I’ve done it quite a few times before, but it seems like this shift is quite a bit more dramatic.

How has working in this more loose & painterly style affected your approach to executing the work? Do you find that your working methods and thought process is different when working in this style?

Yeah, very different. The main issue is editing. I have always had a tendency to fill up every space. It’s like a mental block that I have. I know there’s a medical term for that. Not sure what it is... Something like OCD. Anyway, I had to keep looking at these paintings to figure out if I wanted to put more in because the painting needed it or if I was just habitually filling in empty space. There’s a piece in the show called “Code” that is about the way that I see things. I have a lot of trouble with reading & generally paying attention. I think that I fill spaces like that when I stop thinking about the painting & just let myself go.

The obvious theme in this body of work is the darkness of both the palette and the imagery. Is this series a personal statement of some inner darkness or does it address some greater concept outside your personal experience?

There’s obviously a lot of heavy emotion going on in this work. I’ve always had dark themes in my work, but I really wanted to explore that part of it. I was a little shocked, frankly, when I did the first few of these paintings. They just didn’t seem to fit with the rest of my work. The bottom line for me was that they felt like more accurate portrayals of those feelings so, ultimately I gave into it & just painted.

I’ve always found that if I put a lot of myself into my work it’s much more satisfying & it actually makes for better work in general. Part of the emotion in this show is about my personal life & part of it is about the state of things in the world today. The last show that I did, “American Cyclops” was about American history & how the original intent behind the formation of America was corrupted over time. I tried to look at that in a personal light & see how my own intentions get corrupted. There’s a quote in one of the paintings, “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”. That is from a proposed version of the great seal that was put forward by Benjamin Franklin & John Adams. It seemed extremely relevant, given the state of America, today. It also made sense on a personal level. For me it is about re-thinking your beliefs & killing off the bullshit. This new show is all about that bullshit that invades your mind & makes you crazy.

This series is very cohesive in its imagery. Is there any particular narrative flow through the show? Communication seems to be a central theme with the "ticker tape" elements seemingly representing dialogue of some sort. What does the series title "Vapor" signify?

I don’t know if there is a narrative, necessarily. The ideas are very abstract. When I first started sketching out ideas for this show there was an obvious narrative. It felt like it was too limiting, though. I didn’t want to end up illustrating my feelings too clearly. I think that would have distracted me from the more complex aspects of those feelings.

Yeah, the ticker-tape is all about communication. It’s about how impossible it is to really express yourself completely. You either find yourself spewing ideas in an attempt to explain things (“Liar”) or you hold back some element of the story because you don’t know how to say it or maybe you don’t even know it’s there (“Cut”). In “Wrong”, it is more about unspoken persistent thoughts. The feeling that something is wrong is one that I’ve carried with me my whole life. I’ve always felt like there was something wrong with me, but also that there is something wrong with the world & everyone in it. I think that feeling is pretty universal.

The title is purposefully vague. I wanted to give myself a lot of room to interpret the ideas that I was having. Vapor is abstract & volatile, like relationships, feelings... Life itself. I thought a lot about death & loss & how impossibly difficult it is to get a grasp on my own thoughts. “Scatterbrain” is all about that. I also made a point of keeping the titles to a single word. That’s part of the editing that I tried to do in every part of the show.

Some new "characters" seem to have emerged in these paintings. Can you elaborate on the imagery in the paintings "Liar", "Passing", & "Tyrant"?

“Liar” has a character called “Relphe” in it that I have used before. He’s a darker, more sinister version of the “Helper” character.

The big dragon in “Passing” is just a reworking of the “Dragamel” character that has been popping up in my work for that last few years. I like to keep the characters that I use flexible & ambiguous. That way I can just paint & not try to remember how many horns he has or where his teeth go. He’s like a wart-hog sometimes & more like a traditional Chinese dragon at other times.

“Tyrant” is totally new to me. I see him as totally pure evil. There’s really no personality there at all. There’s usually some sort of balance in my characters, but not here. The quote behind him is the same one that I used in “American Cyclops”.

This new show debuts in Berlin at the Pictoplasma conference. Is this work indicative of what's to come in your future solo shows, particularly the upcoming solo show at Billy Shire Fine Arts?

I feel like there is a lot to explore in this new direction, so I think I’ll keep pushing it forward. I am really interested in pushing the intensity further, so I’d say look for even more drama in the next show. The main goal for that show will be to explore my own fear of these feelings really taking over & controlling me. I want to make the audience understand that fear as much as possible. There’s only so much of that that I can do with paintings hanging on a wall, so I’m going to have to take it quite a bit further. You should probably bring earplugs.

The LA art scene seems to be digging itself deeper into a hole of repetitive, derivative cartoon imagery, feeding off toy culture and art school illustration styles in particular. What's your opinion of the West Coast pop art scene and where would you like to see happen to it?

I think there are a lot of amazing artists out here that come from a production background. I came from animation & my work looked like it & still does to some extent. My goal is to break away from the mental state that I learned to be in when I was in that industry. There was so much concentration on illustrating a point & then there was the need to adhere to technical specifications, plus I had to listen to other people’s opinions. It’s tough to make work that is truly innovative when you are thinking about all of that stuff. I think the best fine artists are the ones that don’t think about any of it & just do what they want to do.

I’d love to see artists break out of their own limitations & do things that don’t make sense. I see a lot of work that looks like a pitch to a toy company or a character model for a cartoon. I can relate to thinking like that. I do it all the time. It’s fun, but I think it’s ultimately limiting.

The real breakthrough, for me, is for media to adjust in order to accommodate the requirements of the artist, rather than the artist adjusting their work so it can be used in the current formats that are available. That’s when truly original ideas happen.

[sleepboy]

He has a new website: timbiskup.com/.

And another show in LA finally coming up.

[svenman]

Sept 23, 2011 10:56:42 GMT -8 insomniac said:

A little NSFW...

Tim Biskup
Untitled
Cel-vinyl acrylic on canvas
24" x 36"
$10,000.00

www.laluzdejesus.com/shows/2011/LaLuz_XXV_1/Biskup.htm

that's pretty wonderful.

[sketchv]

Love it!

[The Gorgon]

New Tim Biskup interview with LA I'm Yours blog:

Creative Hysteria: An Interview With Tim Biskup


Tim Biskup is an American artist from Los Angeles–which makes things complicated and easy at the same time since, well, no one is actually from Los Angeles. People are born here, people leave here, and people come here: no one stays forever. He sits in a glass corner of his house, a corner that was recently transformed from playroom to lounge. The view of a pool in the background taunts, but doesn’t invite as it’s cold outside.

“I was born in Santa Monica but I grew up in Woodland Hills as a kid,” he says casually, “and then one day, a car drove through the front of our house.” He laughs nonchalantly, breezing past the car. “We lived on a busy corner in Woodland Hills and that was it for my mom. She was just like, ‘Well, time to move to the country!’”

He and his family moved up to Lake Tahoe when he was fourteen, where he ended up finishing school. “After high school, I went to OTIS to go to art school in LA. I did two years of that and it just was not for me. The art world at that time–this was ‘86 through ‘88–was just way too much thinking and conceptualizing and not enough technical stuff, you know? I wanted to learn to paint and draw and I just felt overwhelmed by all the thinking, the BS that was going on.” He laughs, hypercasually, “I think I was a little lazy, too.”

Thus, the second door closed on Los Angeles: he moved north, to Fresno. “I left and started a record label. I had always been in bands, like in high school, and I started putting out records and ended up owning a record store. I put out a lot of really bizarre, experimental records and some punk rock. It was really all over the place. But, I enjoyed that for a long time and then drawing and printing covers was more interesting than the music at some point.”

Which, yet again, opened the door back to the city. But, this time, things would be a little more consistent. Living room crashing cars and disappointing art school experiences were out of the picture. Cartoon animation was in, though.

“I got rid of the record store and moved to LA and got an animation job. And, at the same time, I was doing graphics for skateboard companies and stuff like that. Visual art got interesting again for me–when I saw Ren and Stimpy and started going to Disneyland again. The things I really liked about art became clear to me.”

Biskup worked at a lot of studios: Klasky-Csupo, Hyperion, Disney, and Spümcø with John K. But, even while working at one place, he was keeping busy at another. “I worked on Bjork’s video [at Spümcø] for a couple of months and stayed on for a long time just doing TV commercials and stuff like that. I always did freelance, so I’d be working full-time at Cartoon Network and be doing freelance for Nickelodeon and Disney and Film Roman or something like that”

And, while working as an animator, he was constantly making art and getting his art out into the world, on his own terms. “I started doing these kind of guerrilla-style live auctions at bars. And I would just get a bunch of friends to take art to this bar and we would invite people and we would get on the microphone and we would auction our work off…I had friends like Mark Ryden, Gary Baseman, Glenn Barr, and all these people who were putting work into these things and it really was the launch pad for my career in the fine art world. And, a lot of other people’s too! There were other artists who were working in animation and illustration that found an audience like that. And now, they’re just artists. It’s awesome. ”

His strong will and drive to create on his own term is what would define him, an element that he finds to be do-it-yourself derived from his punk rock background. “I left art school because I just couldn’t think about my work in the way that people seemed to be telling me I needed to think about my work. I had to do my own thing. I had to learn my own way and so when it came to showing at a gallery: if I couldn’t show at a gallery the way I wanted to, if [showing at a gallery] wasn’t easy, then I would do auctions. And, when I got the opportunity to make toys, I had so many galleries and other artists telling me ‘Don’t do it: they won’t take you seriously.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t care. Maybe I should but I can’t not do the thing that is going in the direction of where my art is going.’ I’ve always been that way: I’ve always made the wrong choice that turned out to be right for me in some way. I think there are more people in Los Angeles that are comfortable with making choices for themselves and not choices based on the trajectory of their career.

“I think Jeffrey Deitch is a perfect example of that. The fact that he chooses artists based on what he likes and what he thinks is cool and not based on what other people think he should be showing. I don’t know him personally, so I don’t know to what extent that is the case, but it seems to me for him to all of a sudden have Barry McGee, front and center, to kind of transform his career? I just saw that as miraculous. At the time, I was just like, ‘Oh my God: this guy is doing something really amazing.’”

Biskup is a man who doesn’t take any shit from anyone and, truly, does what he wants. Like Deitch and McGee and other contemporaries, he is proud to know what he wants and does what he wants. This is something that I believe we can pin on to his punk rock background because, deep down inside, Tim Biskup is a rockstar. A supercool, risktaking, animation inspired, hilarious rockstar–which may or may not have anything to do with Los Angeles, but the city does in fact coddle it.

“I read somewhere, an interview with a gallerist in New York, [where] they were saying, ‘We’re not interested in an artist who wants to be a star. We’re interested in an artist whose work means more to them than their personal fame.’ I thought that’s bullshit because Andy Warhol and Dali and those guys: they were pop stars and they changed the way that people looked at art. They made people want to go to galleries–you know what I mean? There’s this kind of disdain for artists being popular because they’re interesting or attractive or whatever. I think that sucks, I think it’s a drag. Seeing Murakami on the morning news one day, I’m like, ‘Awesome.’ That’s great, that’s what I want. I want there to be artists that are so interesting that they end up on Conan or David Letterman or something. That hasn’t happened yet but I’m really hoping that there is a time when that happens.”

Yet, this goes back to more than just the artist as a personality, but also the artist’s art as entertainment–which seems to be a little unique to Los Angeles. “There’s a new kind of art that’s happening that is a hybrid of conceptual art and aesthetic art, aesthetic beauty. I think when you combine those things you come up with something really interesting. That’s what I think the art world is diving into right now. It’s blossoming in LA more. I think it’s happening all over the world but I think in Los Angeles it’s very, very widely accepted.”

But, what exactly is that? One could attribute this combination to the explosion of the Internet and things being more accessible, but Los Angeles’ close ties to show business seem to be what makes it unique. And, a step ahead in where art is heading. “A lot of the patrons of the arts [in Los Angeles] are people from the movie industry and people from the entertainment world. I think, at least on some level, they have to have some effect when saying, ‘We really like this kind of work.’ Galleries sell this kind of work more easily here then they do in New York. Because, in New York, if you take home a Mark Ryden painting and hang it on your wall, less of your friends are gonna look at it and go, ‘Whoa: that’s awesome!’ than your friends that are gonna go, ‘What is that? That looks like a kid’s illustration.’ You know? It’s just sentimental.

“You get the same complaints that you get from art critics, that this work is ‘too personal…too sentimental…this work just doesn’t have depth.’ I think that a lot of that kind of work really cancels out people’s ability to look deeper into the work because they just see the surface level and they go, ‘Eh, its just entertainment.’

“People go to the street art show at MOCA and they go, ‘Oh, man: such a sell out.’ It’s all just fun and great and everything. But, if you look beyond that and you look to the work in there that is really good and compelling and has deeper levels to it, there’s some really amazing stuff in there.”

And, Biskup is exactly right: he is in a league of contemporary artists that are pushing boundaries and mediums, dipping into the commercial world to win an audience. Moreover, this is something closely linked to Hollywood and the idea of art as entertainment. As everything has become in the twenty first century, your success is based on how many Likes and Followers you have. Biskup embraces that and represents a future in art that is growing here.

And, as far as the city, it doesn’t seem like he’s going anywhere–since he now has his own family here. He lived all around the city, but found the perfect spot in La Cañada: a nice, quiet slice of mid-century modern heaven (quite akin to the house in A Single Man). “ was looking for a place with a better school district and a little bit more space. And then when I saw this place, it was just like–forget it–that’s it. The rest of my life, that’s what I want. I’ve been in this place for five years and I quit working in animation about…I guess, seven years ago now? Seven or eight years ago. And all I’ve been doing is showing my art all over the world. And you know, DJ-ing as a hobby.”

For more on Tim, check out his new website, catch his new show on October 14, and be sure to pick up his new record.

www.laimyours.com/1014/creative-hysteria-an-interview-with-tim-biskup/
































By Kyle Fitzpatrick
Photos by Justin Sullivan
Posted October 3, 2011

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[The Gorgon]

Insomniac,

They're awesome pics.

[sleepboy]

Here are some photos from his show at THIS gallery.

[The Gorgon]

Thanks for posting Sleepy. I have yet to see the exhibit in person. Pony is the best in show.

[sleepboy]

Some photos of his recent install at The Standard in Hollywood.

[sleepboy]

More pics from the installation at The Standard.

[sleepboy]

[svenman]

great video - enjoyed it.
been seeing lots of screen grabs of late on his instagram, so was looking forward to seeing the final product.
well matched with mastodon as well...

[The Gorgon]

Tim Biskup X Samsung

[sleepboy]

A new piece he is working on.

[sleepboy]

Progressing...

[saL]

I've been liking Tim's work for quite some now, but after seeing this latest work, I think it's time for me to get serious about it...

thanks for sharing these!

[The Gorgon]

Mar 29, 2012 9:01:09 GMT -8 saL said:

I've been liking Tim's work for quite some now, but after seeing this latest work, I think it's time for me to get serious about it...

thanks for sharing these!

I'm glad you think that Sal. I dig his work a lot n

[The Gorgon]

Tim Biskup does a talk at OTIS regarding his journey and education as an artists. It's 60 minutes long, but worth every minute. Super interesting.

[hann30]

Fan of Tim's work! Thanks for posting the videos.

[sleepboy]

Final maybe?

[saL]

new giclée on canvas by Tim Biskup will be dropping some time today, 22nd of April 2012 @ his online store:



Edition Size: 23
Atist's Proofs: 6
Printers Proof: 1
Image Size: 36" x 29"
Framed Size: Apx 42" x 35" x 4"
Giclée Print on Streched Canvas
Price: $1,000.00 (unframed) Price: $1,500.00 (framed)

visit Tim's online store for more info >

[paulypaul]

I'm particularly struck by this piece. I'm not sure how he gets so much character into such a geometric image and I love the contrast between the hard edges of the figure and the soft, blended background. I have a Gareth Morgan piece which is similar in desire but this is the better looking cousin.

Having said that, I couldn't imagine hanging anything but the original. Anyone know anything about that?

[saL]

Apr 22, 2012 13:15:14 GMT -8 paulypaul said:

Having said that, I couldn't imagine hanging anything but the original. Anyone know anything about that?

it was a piece he did for Twin Peaks show @ Copro Gallery - www.copronason.com/tpreview2/ (not seeing it listed, so you might wanna contact them directly)

[The Gorgon]

Paulypaul,

The original was massive and sold for $25K even before the show started. The buyer later commissioned Tim for an accompanying Audrey Horn piece.

[sleepboy]

That Samsung piece that was based on his daughter will be auctioned off along with work from other artists Tomorrow night at Martha Otero (showthread).