Timothy Betton
Degree: BA Painting (First Class Honours)
University: University of Edinburgh / Edinburgh College of Art
Graduation Year: 2020
New Blood Art Commentary
Timothy Betton is interested in how light can distort a space, warp its boundaries, and create a spectacle of its own. If light is the ultimate material, how do we capture it in all its elusiveness? Betton offers a reply in his two-dimensional works, turning to light’s first receiver – the human eye. After all, it is only through the eye and its camera-like intricacies that light can be tempered at all – the iris a camera’s shutter, the retina its film. Betton’s abstract pieces are distinctly concerned with this modulation, using geometric studies and linear repetitions to balance multiple facades of paint. Through his palette of greens and blues lies mystery; slight colour adjustments we may or may not pick up on, and the slowed down fading of light into dark that is impossible to separate.
As of 2021 Timothy has begun the MA in Landscape Architecture at University of Sheffield, a degree combining his interest in art, nature, and space.
Artist Statement
My work is concerned with the display of lines and geometries in and around the natural world and how these spaces are intersected, interfered with and interjected by light. My curiosity of how we experience space and the human need to create boundaries within space is documented in my work. I aim to translate three dimensional spectacles of light and nature into two dimensional works, using the medium of paint and mixed media. How we interpret image and volume varies and this is something that is used to my advantage in my work. I use the idea of interpretation and subjectivity, playing on the human eye, to form geometric studies that have multiple facades, depending on who the observer is. I like to create a paradox with the medium of shape, creating work that encourages the viewer to stop and analyse the piece, questioning the relationship of light and dark, art and architecture and positive and negative. Thus, my practice pushes boundaries of both the built and unbuilt environments. I am ultimately examining the absence of space and the impact that geometry and nature has on this.
Group Exhibitions
(2021) Final, not Over - again, Unit 1 Gallery, London
(2020) Paradigm Lux, Tent Gallery, Edinburgh
(2020) THIS IS TOMORROW (Wishing you were here), Zembla with Alt-D, Hawick
(2020) ECA/ 1.0 DESIGN, 1.0 Design, Edinburgh
(2020) Summer 2020 Degree Show, Edinburgh College of Art, Online