There is an urgency and sense of disruption in the marks and the
battered surfaces of Timothy Hawkesworth’s drawings, a similar
quality that is seen in the artist’s paintings. The energized
marks relentlessly make and unmake the images that seem to come to
us as survivors rather than products of the process. One senses a
meditative stillness and equilibrium which overlays the restless
quality of the artist’s hand in his work.
Donald Kuspit has written that “Hawkesworth’s art is about
the uncanniness of suffering.” In the artist’s work, however,
there is more evidence of the force of life. It seems to be informed
by the old paradox: because death is inevitable, all human activity
is futile; it is at the same time and for the same reason, heroic and
deeply touching. Elizabeth Sussman has written: “Hawkesworth’s
art conveys a desire for painting to return to its primary concern
for deep existential meaning.”
Mr. Hawkesworth, who grew up in Ireland, draws heavily from his European
roots. It is, as Donald Kuspit has noted, "art that is existentially
and humanistically orientated. It is concerned to articulate a tragic
sensibility.... Art once again engaged with trying to say what it means
to be human”. Educated in Trinity College Dublin, Hawkesworth
has been exhibiting regularly in New York and Ireland. His work has
received considerable critical attention and is in many public and
private collections including the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston. He has exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy,
Dublin, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and the List Visual Arts
Center at MIT in Cambridge, MA.
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