Slowinski readings page ~ Slowinski paintings
Excerpt form the article: Nude Exhibition at Rondout by Lei
Issacs
Woodstock Times, Feb 16, 1984, a review of a group exhibition in Kingston, NY
Nude exhibition at Rondout
An exhibition entitled 'The Nude" opened February 11 at the Gallery Rondout, 63 Broadway in downtown Kingston. The exhibition displays paintings, drawings, photographs and videos of the human body by twelve Ulster County artists.
At first glance, the show is dominated by the four large works by Tim Slowinski. Poetic yet cheerless, the four works display an unusual technique presumably utilizing graphite and gouache. They resemble enormous pencil andwatercolor sketches, with all of the sensitive shading of pencil work and the clear, light shades of watercolor. The anatomy of Slowinski's models was emphasized by his selective simplification of form. The realism of the works was downplayed by "the fragmentation of each painting, with geometrical portions of each appearing on several different physical levels.
Tim Slowinski's "Born Again Healer is striking. In the artist's familiar style it relates at many levels. It portrays a robot-cartoon healer performing the ritual before his congregation. His hand, firmly placed upon the healee's breast, seems both to give and take, acknowledging many taboos! Behind, ecstatic, the people pay, and the money totem fills the basket. It is a tough and cynical story gently told, relieved by the abstract humor of Slowinski's forms and figures.
---Tim Slowinski is not very verbal, and what he says is to the point and brief. "My paintings are not subtle." He read a statement composed for the occasion. Of Woodstock he said he has "little feeling of artistic community now."
His slides showed acrylic paintings of the last two years-social lampoons derived from "growing up in Northern New Jersey," and developing a hate/love relation with fast-food culture, the commercial world, slot machines, hucksterism, greed and corporate rip-off. He came here in 1979 and stayed because he "found cheap places to live." His style changes every three years or so. His images deliver powerful wallops, and stay in the mind; one observer acutely remarked, "they are great paintings, but would be difficult to live with---