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ESCANABA -- Bay College has announced an exhibition, Tim Cleary, Façade (To Face), comming to the Besse Gallery. On display October 6-November 19, 2026. There will be an Artist talk October 15 at 2 p.m. at the exhibit.
Tim Cleary grew up standing over a compass rose in northern Michigan. The landscape of this region has been extremely influential on his landscape painting practice, and his sense of space, light, season, even community. He painted as a child, and has found various ways to maintain the habit; including but not limited to, undergraduate degrees in painting and photography at Miami University, and a MFA from Pratt institute. He has received a range of grants, awards and residencies as an artist and educator. Currently, he paints and teaches full-time as a Professor of Painting and Drawing at Northern Michigan University.
His artistic direction is informed and fueled by evolving interests in art history, perception, meteorology, memory, abstraction, photography, Gerhard Richter, Phenomenology, wind, Monet, Manet, circadian rhythms, Mark Rothko, Modest Mouse, his grandfather, birds, Andrew Bird, cardinal directions, atmosphere, his students, the obliquity of the elliptic, e.e. cummings, Bertolt Brecht, reflections, Dana Saulnier, Willem DeKooning and travel... to name a few of the nameable.
Artist statement
“I have been painting for a few decades now. Teaching has expanded my practice in wide ranging directions, but two subjects have always remained: the landscape and the facade. Likewise, even though I now work in a range of media, oil painting has always felt like home to me. Oil paint allows for colors that I have only ever been able to compare to the landscape.
“Oil paint also allows me to work representationally - an approach that I find problematic in the most rewarding way. Even the most realistic painting is an abstraction of a space, a surface, an atmosphere, a time of year. I have always loved that painting seems to get to have it both ways; to be the thing it represents and to be its own fantastic object - a locus for sharing a memory, an emotion, a feeling, or even a fear.
“These paintings carry traditional techniques and subjects from the history of landscape painting into places where the classical subjects of ‘beauty’ and ‘ruin’ can be reinterpreted to offer new perspectives about the relationship between humans and the landscape. In some works, an unspoiled, empty landscape invites us to wander. In other pieces the spectacle of decay conflates progress and decline across tenuous boundaries between the natural world and our own, inviting us to wonder. Unconventional compositional strategies and multi-paneled images emphasize uncanny resemblances between structures to further complicate the straightforward representational nature of painting.
“Beyond all the commentary on the history of painting, I hope you see the works as sundials, and invitations to consider your own experiences in the landscape. Stand face to face with me, just as I stood watching weathered buildings return to the horizon, the view to the season. The paintings are still, but they record and infer movement. The movement may seem slow, but that also depends on your perspective.
“Not everyone does, but so many people have rich memories connected to landscapes and ruins they have known. What do you see? What do you remember? Face the painting. Face each other and remember with me.”