Tim in the studio 2020                                                                   Shooting on Oregon Coast, 2019

My Grandmother was a life long painter. My Mother is a painter, multimedia artist, and illustrator. My Father is a stained glass artist, a wood worker, and just all around creative guy with a long career as a landscape architect. Creativity is in my blood it seems. In junior high school I got my first camera. By the time I finished high school I'd experienced some success with photography and knew I wanted to make a career out of it. My earliest inspiration was the landscapes of Southwest Colorado and Southeast Utah where I spent a good part of my childhood.

I studied photography and graphic arts in college in Flagstaff, Arizona and started my career working for other photographers freelancing as a photographer’s assistant in 1989. I've managed to make a living since then primarily through photography. The crazy thing is it wasn’t until the last 8 years that I started thinking of myself as an artist. My focus always had a commercial orientation to it even though when I wasn't working I've always made images that were purely my art. It's actually hard for me to stop constantly framing photographs in my head and thinking about lighting and angles and when I'll come back to make that perfect photograph with the perfect light and season.

Now I’ve embraced myself as an artist. I’ve come to realize I’ve always been an artist. For a long time I held a deep-seated fear of becoming that “starving artist” I was warned so many times about way back when I first started. I was determined not to be that and therefore my aversion to the word artist.

In 2011 I showed my wife some old paintings I’d made in high school and she said I should take up painting again. She seemed to really like them and after "the great recession" I was looking for some new way to continue my creative career so I started painting and taking classes. My continuous reinvention continues now with the additions of painting and filmmaking. I'm excited to see where it takes me and what new experiences and and insight it might give me.

The struggle to live, to thrive, that is what nature is all about. And in that struggle there is beauty of many varieties. It can make you cry. It can overwhelm you. It can make you laugh or scream. It can scare or surprise you beyond your imagination. Or cause you to just stand in silent awe. My goal is to seek out these experiences and capture them to share with others. My art is my vehicle through which I experience the world. It is my struggle. It is me.

While I mostly photograph and paint “Nature” in some form, I do believe Humans and what we do are also a unique part of nature. I believe as modern Human animals, we are just starting to learn (hopefully) and we are struggling with how to better live with the rest of nature. It's a challenge for us Humans as we seem to be particularly good at destroying or altering nature. So I think Humanity and what we Humans do relating to this Earth is a big part of what I will be exploring in my current and future art.

When I was a boy I wrote that I felt Humans had great potential and we were either blessed or cursed with a special cleverness to be able to drastically change our environment to our liking and comfort. I also wrote we had great potential if and only if we could move beyond what I call our primitive and selfish instincts and learn to live in and appreciate this really quite magical world we have the honor of struggling in.

Obviously I love photography and painting. I am also intensely curious about certain things, some of them of a political nature and others of a more sociological and environmental preservation leaning. I hope to do more documentary film making and explore those topics that intrigue me . Rock climbing was a huge part of my life for 25 years or so. That is how I met my wife, Amy. Amy and I don't climb nearly as much as we used to. Now we love to travel, sea kayak, hike, ski, camp and just general low to mid level adventuring  whenever we can. We live in Seattle, Washington where we work and plan our adventures both near and far.

I hope this was interesting. Thanks for reading all the way through it. If you'd like to follow me, my art, please click through to my social media outlets and sign up for my occasional newsletters. - Tim