Biography

Timothy J. Clark’s watercolor and oil paintings are represented in permanent museum collections including The Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, Maine’s Farnsworth Art Museum, and the Smithsonian/National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. The artist’s sketchbook of drawings of Ground Zero, created at the still-smoldering site within days of the attack, were acquired for the collection of the Museum of the City of New York.

A mid-career retrospective of Clark’s work opened at the Pasadena Museum of California Art in January 2008, then traveled to the Butler Institute of American Art in Ohio in June, and to the Whistler House Museum of Art in Lowell, Massachusetts in August. Hammer Galleries will mount a solo exhibition of his paintings in New York in January 2009.

In conjunction with Clark’s retrospective, a book, Timothy J. Clark, was published in January 2008 by Pomegranate Communications, and also serves as an exhibition catalog. With an introduction by Will Barnet, a biographical essay by the noted authority on California art and director of California’s Irvine Museum, Mr. Jean Stern, a critical essay by renowned art historian and award-winning author Dr. Lisa Farrington, and an afterword by Ira Goldberg, director of the Art Students League of New York, the book provides a thorough review of four decades of the artist’s work including drawings, oils and watercolor paintings. In the book, Dr. Farrington writes of Clark’s paintings as “diffidently profound documents of human existence,” and she notes his “almost uncanny ability to infuse rudimentary and inert objects...with something akin to a human soul.”

Fine Art Connoisseur magazine featured Clark and his work in an illustrated article “Timothy J. Clark: Master of Color, Light, and Shadow” in the July/August 2008 issue.

Clark’s recent awards include the William A. Paton Award at the National Academy’s 175th Exhibition, the President’s Award in 2003 and the Salzman Award in 2004 in the National Arts Club’s annual exhibiting members show, and the Watercolor Award in the Allied Artists annual exhibition in 2005, all in New York City. He received Best of Show at the Liebig Art Center’s exhibition, Political Animals: Donkeys and Elephants in American art, in Naples Florida in 2008. Paintings by Clark have been exhibited in international exhibitions at the Allied Museum in Berlin, Germany, the Danubiana Museum in Bratislava, Slovakia, and the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul, Turkey.


A faculty member at the Art Students League in New York, Clark has also taught at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, the Worcester Museum of Art in Massachusetts, the National Academy School in New York, and Yale University’s Graduate School of Architecture’s Continuity and Change Program in Rome. He was named one of the “20 Great Teachers in America” by Watercolor magazine in Fall 2006.

Clark, a graduate of the California Institute of the Arts and the Chouinard Art Institute, serves on the Cal Arts Alumni Board in Valencia, California, and maintains studios in Capistrano Beach, California, West Bath, Maine, and New York City.