Fort Mason: Tim Christensen Profile “I often am confronted by astounding beauty and I try to reflect upon that impact, transferring the experience to other images.” The raw beauty, sensuality or deep human emotion inherent in an image is what figurative artist Tim Christensen strives to convey in his work, and his hope is that his art will touch you and elicit a response. The New Zealand native who came to the San Francisco Bay Area some 20 years ago to study feminism on a scholarship at UC Berkeley believes that it is the role of the artist to provide a lens for society to view the world. “I feel a responsibility to stimulate thought and feeling in the society around me,” he emphasizes. “I want to engage my viewers to react strongly to whatever I present to them.” Power of the human form Inspired by the Bay Area Figurative School of Art, (Joan Brown, Elmer Bischoff, etc.) along with modern masters, such as Lucian Freud and Cecily Brown, Christensen originally focused on the power of the human form. More recently he expanded to other subjects -- a series entitled “Deep Space,” which is based on images acquired from the Hubble Telescope, and “Waves” inspired by the large waves of the California coast near his home. Persuaded by his young children and his many years as a diver, he also has created large-scale works of marine life and flowers. Christensen describes his work as bold, fast, instinctive and at times almost primitive “My work is often large, always bright, hot and sexy, as is life,” he says. “My art is impatient and energetic. The brush strokes do not require deep analysis; they are emotive and tactile. Pieces are generally ‘wet.’ Some say the paint colors are ‘fat’, with sloppy, dripping, blazes of color so bright that it immediately captures the viewer.” Interpreting the subject through personal experience Christensen seldom attempts to approximate realism but rather interprets the subject through his own experience. “Often my best works result from the challenging and invigorating experience of working with the live model or my visual replay of an engaging experience, such as being rolled by a tremendously powerful wave on the way out to a dive site, somewhere on the wild coast of Northern California,” he says Subject matter drives the technical aspects of Christensen’s work. He may rapidly execute a gigantic ocean wave on a large-scale canvas, using vast fluid strokes of paint to convey motion. On the other hand “Aurora,” a series of interpretive skyscapes, softly bleeds across the canvas to reflect the ethereal nature of that subject matter. Whatever the subject, Christensen believes that our lives are greatly enriched by all forms of art, and that we must learn both as a society and as individuals to invest in these important works in order to maintain our spirit and to preserve our cultural expressions. Being able to play a small part in that dialogue is what helps Christensen validate his being an artist.