Tim Clare and Leslie Lowinger at Worthington Gallery West
Frank Cebulski
Artweek, September 2006, Vol. 37, Iss. 7

The exhibition Patterns of Places includes a dozen collage pieces in tin and aluminum from Tim Clare’s “shield” and “quilt” series, and Leslie Lowinger’s recent abstractions, etchings and drawings of city scenes and people.  Both artists rely on rhythmic geometric and repeated stylistic patterns in the compositions of their works.  Clare’s collages are enriched by the images and icons of colorful vintage product tins, while Lowinger’s etchings create an antique atmosphere of space and isolation in cityscapes.

Clare was raised on Long Island, New York; his father owned a delicatessen in Douglaston Queen’s.  he studied at New York City school of Visual Arts and taught art workshops at several Museum’s including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Bronx Museum.  He moved to Los Angeles in 1987 and then to San Francisco in 1993, where he currently lives and works.  Clare first became interested in popular culture and the images and decorations of packaging while working for his father in his delicatessen, where products were displayed in the shop’s front windows.  He made his first sculptures and mixed media collages from materials and objects he found on the streets and “in the dumpsters of New York and Brooklyn.”

After moving to San Francisco, he started to draw and paint on found pieces of metal, and then became fascinated with working with tin when he found an old tin dollhouse one day on the way to his studio at Pier 17.  He then began to search “the city thrift stores, yard sales and flea markets” for tin packaging boxes with bright and colorful images and patterns.  He uses these images to create metal collages by cutting them into shapes, patterns, and complex designs that incorporate directly the package icons, often with an ironic or satiric “twist.”

Clare’s ”shield” series started from his interest in his Irish-English heritage and the designs and symbols on heraldic crests.  These pieces in fact are shaped in like chevrons or crests with partitions and “symbolic” icons that resemble actual family crests or medieval shields.  Notable in this series are Shield for the New Republic, which incorporates Budweiser emblems from aluminum beer cans, and Howdy Pilgrim, which ironically pays homage to the Pilgrims and the first emigrants arriving on the Mayflower.  His quilt series duplicates the look and feel of traditional quilt patterns in tin and found images repeated in aluminum strips, molding and wainscoting.  The craftsmanship in these works is masterful and impressive, producing the identical effect of folk patterns and the craftwork of traditional quilt makers.  Satisfaction is a large work in homage to his mother and the “myth of the perfect fifties home and family” and its roots and origins.

Lowinger was born in New Orleans, grew up in Detroit, attended art school in London, and then lived in New York for fifteen years-and Hamburg- before moving to San Francisco, where she has lived for the past twelve years.  San Francisco Center, an etching based on drawings she made at the San Francisco Shopping Center of people moving up and down on the escalators there, evokes the distinct rhythmic movement of a spiral with the figures floating in and out of the picture plane.  A work I especially enjoy is Long Island, a charcoal drawing of a winter street scene that is full of emotion and familiarity, with dirty snow piled high along the sidewalk.  The city skyline in the background is equally haunting with wintry dark and dirty light.  This drawing vibrates with gestural strokes and the graphic sweep of lines and smears.  Drawings like this one on a larger scale would be truly exciting and forceful for their atmospheric quality and antique chiaroscuro.