Artist, designer, and professor Tim Speaker pulls from a wealth of interests to create his distinct paintings.
Driven by his passions, Tim Speaker wishes he had more lifetimes to explore them.
“Music, film, literature, poetry—I’ve just been in love with those things since I was a child,” the ArtBomb artist, designer, and Anderson University design and typography professor says.
In both conscious and subconscious ways, Speaker’s constant curiosity finds its way into his characteristic paintings that combine portraiture with lines of text. Created with layers of acrylic paint, graphite, and charcoal on various surfaces, each painting “has a story,” he says. “And … history is deeply embedded in everything.”
Life experiences also serve as inspirations. Speaker’s explorations of physical and psychological deterioration come from his hardscrabble childhood in the post-industrial city of Saginaw, Michigan. “I feel dramatically connected to the way that I grew up there,” he says. “My favorite people in the world are there. My grandma’s 103, and she still has all her mental faculties. We talk on the phone twice a week.”
One painting series addresses the four years Speaker was blind—from ages 18 to 22—because of a genetic eye condition called keratoconus. Two eye transplants restored his vision, and special contacts solved a second eyesight threat later in life. “I’m super grateful I get to do this because there was a time when I couldn’t,” he says.
While Speaker’s painted faces are sometimes recognizable (Elvis is an example), often an image he finds in his vintage photograph collection “just speaks to me as a narrative,” he says.
His incorporated lines of text are meant to engage viewers and give them entrance points to the paintings. They might come from the often-read words of his favorite writer, T.S. Eliot; a familiar song; or a line of French symbolism poetry, the focus of his undergraduate degree in literature from Central Michigan University. Whatever the chosen words, they are depicted in different fonts, a nod to Speaker’s long-held love of lettering. “I was into type when I didn’t know what it was as a kid,” he says. “Now, it’s still inextricably linked to everything I do. I rarely think without type.”
Every painting has an intentionally monochromatic palette, where one or two background colors offset the portrait’s black, white, and gray tones. Perhaps it’s the palette or the way each person is rendered with a serious, piercing-eyed expression, but “a lot of people find my work to be dark,” Speaker says.
He’s not bothered by those opinions.
“I think when you seek meaning, you tend towards darker themes. There’s a seeking in all this work,” he says. “It’s not darkness for morbidity or depression. I want you to feel something with it and make your own connections.”
It’s the Bomb
An artist there for 16 years, Speaker calls ArtBomb Studios “one of the greatest gifts of my life.” It was where he first met his wife, Elizabeth, a studio mate who works in cut paper and printmaking.
The two were married in ArtBomb’s garden in 2017, and now their 4-year-old daughter Sophie’s toys fill a spot near Speaker’s easels. He often works without turning on his studio’s artificial lights, instead relying on what he calls the “perfect diffused light” from an original pane-glass skylight overhead.
For more information about Speaker and to see his artwork, visit timspeaker.com, or his Instagram account: @timspeaker. More about his classes at the South Carolina School of the Arts at Anderson University may be found at art.schoolofthearts.com/tim-speaker.
