CLARE CLARKSON DEVELOPMENT

Fantastic studio space, friendly and professional. I went in to get some photos done for my duos website. They are exactly what want we wanted. All of our friends comments have been fantastic. Tim was lovely to work with, and great with directing us to achieve our goal. Will be back to the studio very soon :)

When I first looked at Tim Nathan's recent works I used the words 'many have witnessed such scenes but few have captured them’, of course though we ourselves are captive to nature's grand illusions and stand marveling in its elusive presence. What we witness in the evening is gone by morning and so too, the morning skies and horizons are long gone by nightfall.
For Tim Nathan this recent work is a marked end point in what seems to have been a personal journey. What went before were fleeting abstractions and diverse figurative sketches, in which the artist is playing with form and pathos with bold yet delicate strokes of the ink pen.
What we are witnessing is a discovery of the world through glass again, a return to the photographic. Here in this new zen like phase, that is expressive, yet both rigid and disciplined, Tim rests his eyes on that which we seek but never find, only to discover that it was there right in front
of our eyes all the time.
It is as if the drama and anticipation of changing skies and moody seas echo the complication and confusion of our troubled minds. These scenes witnessed through a lens and cast within a frame speak of personal human pain, experiences and circumstances, temper our suffering. The sea and sky bring us a calm wonder and visceral moments in time.
Nature's visual gift to us is that of peace and joy.

Each photograph in this series is both a meditation on our relationship with the natural world, and a celebration of its dramatic beauty.
Popular psychology recommends engaging with something bigger than ourselves in order to heal a fragile mind, and Tim has described his personal story in relation to the work as a transformative journey from despair to high spirits. Stepping away from the dubious business of ‘self-expression’ he has instead deployed persistence and quiet discipline to record the daily phenomena of the sea. The result is a rich and complex narrative of the undisciplined behaviour of air and water; one in which dark clouds release a veil of rain far from the shore anticipating a storm, a whisp of cloud hovers in an almost clear sky, above a tranquil sea, or a full moon casts a nicotine hue across the dark water. Whilst we recognise the scene, the dramatic sensuality that emerges from each image’s composition and the powerful body of work seen together is less familiar.

In her famous love letter to the Cairngoms, ‘The Living Mountain’ Nan Shepherd describes moments in her relationship to the landscape when ‘something moves between me and it. Place and mind may interpenetrate until the nature of both are altered’. something has been altered here, and we are richer for it