Tim Folzenlogen
Encyclopedia
Realism (arts)
Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...
painter
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
based in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. His work has been shown in more than 50 solo shows and he has sold more than 1000 paintings Most of his works depict architectural
Architecture
Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...
details in New York City, and the way features of buildings are illuminated by slanting rays of light.
Biography
Folzenlogen was born and raised in Cincinnati, OhioCincinnati, Ohio
Cincinnati is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio. Cincinnati is the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located to north of the Ohio River at the Ohio-Kentucky border, near Indiana. The population within city limits is 296,943 according to the 2010 census, making it Ohio's...
. He graduated from the Art Academy of Cincinnati
Art Academy of Cincinnati
The Art Academy of Cincinnati is a private college of art and design, accredited by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, in Cincinnati, Ohio...
in 1974. He moved to Washington Heights, Manhattan
Washington Heights, Manhattan
Washington Heights is a New York City neighborhood in the northern reaches of the borough of Manhattan. It is named for Fort Washington, a fortification constructed at the highest point on Manhattan island by Continental Army troops during the American Revolutionary War, to defend the area from the...
in 1982.
Folzenlogen is also a prolific writer who emphasizes the relationship between art and life. His writing style is straightforward and unapologetic, sometimes generating controversy. Folzenlogen's expressing his ideas in words is an important adjunct to his expression in visual media.
Folzenlogen dropped out of the gallery world in 2002 to focus on public art projects, his current emphasis. His works have become more popular with New York City's merchant class and Wall Street
Wall Street
Wall Street refers to the financial district of New York City, named after and centered on the eight-block-long street running from Broadway to South Street on the East River in Lower Manhattan. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, or...
banks. His past clients include Morgan Stanley, Procter & Gamble, Barclays Capitol, and Bill & Charlotte Ford.
Style and critical reception
Folzenlogen's work has been compared to Edward HopperEdward Hopper
Edward Hopper was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching...
and Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh
Vincent Willem van Gogh , and used Brabant dialect in his writing; it is therefore likely that he himself pronounced his name with a Brabant accent: , with a voiced V and palatalized G and gh. In France, where much of his work was produced, it is...
. Critics have called his approach cutting edge and jarring, though in many ways the content of his paintings is familiar and comfortable.
His most common subject matter is the architecture of New York City or scenes of pedestrians. Though a contemporary realism painter, his use of light in these works gives them an impressionistic
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
quality. Dorn Townsend writes in the Manhattan Times, "The everyday aspects of the city have seldom been translated with such brio and glowing reverence" and "every color and every gesture stirs inside the viewer"
In Artspeak, Ed McCormack writes: "...few painters - aside from Wayne Thiebaud, the California artist generally acknowledged as the grand old man of Painterly Realism - have fully succeeded in this complex endeavor. A singular exception is the young Ohio born painter Tim Folzenlogen.... Like Hopper, Folzenlogen is a true painter of the American scene, with the ability to convey a sense of the urban experience in formal rather than anecdotal, terms, establishing emotional resonance through spatial tensions and strong tonal contrasts."
Philosophy
Folzenlogen's views and opinions are expressed in the roughly 200 essays on his web site. In the essay "Dry Paint," he expands a narrow discussion of painting to a broad analogy of human contact. The essay uses the details of an artist's experience to comment on life, an appeal to see something special within the ordinary, a quality with which he seeks to imbue his art.Taking the perspectives of others is an important theme for Folzenlogen. He writes, "Consider the 'other' [person] as deeply as you consider yourself, and you will always find that he or she is thinking and doing exactly what you would think or do, if you were him or her."
