Tim Solliday: Truth & Beauty
After cutting his teeth on billboards, painter Tim Solliday turned to Western art and never looked back.
When Tim Solliday was starting out in his art career, he took a job painting billboards in California. “Big heads and movie stars,” he says of the work. It was a thankless job, but it had decent views of Southern California and his work was being seen, a plus for any artist. It’s the kind of job that serves as a rung on the ladder of a career, but for Solliday the billboards were more than that. They were a callback to his interests—wpa muralists and Golden Age illustrators—but also a foreshadowing event that would reveal where he would be going in the art world.
Today, Solliday is a respected and bankable artist whose works, many rendered in a flat style, are smack dab in the middle of a Venn diagram made of three circles of influence: the WPA, Golden Age of American Illustration and the Taos Society of Artists. And yet while his works call back to previous generations of artists, Solliday also paints with a distinct voice that makes his work uniquely his own.
“I’m trying to give to the viewer the understanding, whether it consciously or unconsciously, of just two elements: truth and beauty. No matter what you do as an artist, those two elements, truth and beauty, are all that any artwork really needs to have,” Solliday says from his studio in Pasadena, California. “For me it all begins with the drawing. The drawing must be truthful. The composition should be truthful. There should be something of knowledge and truth in everything. And then after that there is a sentiment with the subject matter, and that’s where beauty comes in.”
Solliday’s newest works will be on view in a new show opening October 5 at Maxwell Alexander Gallery in Los Angeles. The artist does not present many solo shows, and for this exhibition he will be showing as many as 15 works, which makes the opening especially rare and wonderful for new and old collectors of his work.
Born in Iowa, but raised in Southern California, Solliday began taking an interest in art as early as 5 years old. He grew up primarily in Palos Verdes, a coastal suburb of Los Angeles. “It was beautiful there, especially with the ocean
so close and so many great canyons and places to ride,” he says. “I had two horses there, so my Western roots go way back.” As a teen, he would mostly avoid team-oriented sports and instead he turned to boxing, which shared some aspects of painting, including the solitary training.
After high school, where he would do cartoons and covers for the school newspaper, Solliday landed the billboard job. “It was a great job, especially for someone getting in at an early age. The top painter there was this man— his name was Mario—and he encouraged me to train with this painter who was his teacher, Theodore Lukits,” Solliday says. “Lukits turned out to be really great and I studied with him for seven years. He taught in the old-fashioned academy style of painting. It was with him where I started seeing works by the great American illustrators: N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, Saul Tepper, Frank Schoonover, Dean Cornwell and one of my favorites, Frank Brangwyn.” He adds: “They are all my heroes today, especially Brangwyn. What always impressed me about them was their drawing. They were so far advanced, even over Rembrandt and Michelangelo, who I revere but they had nothing over those great drawers, all of them illustrators.” Today much of Solliday’s work revolves around the drawing. Not only does he do early figure studies in charcoal sticks, he will complete whole renderings of pieces in miniature drawings. And when he’s ready to move to the final canvas he’ll draw it all out in charcoal on the canvas and then lock it in with a spray-on fixative before painting over it in oils. The drawing, detailed and teeming with life, could easily be a piece of art all by itself.
While training under Lukits, Solliday did several book illustrations, thinking that was his path forward. “[Robert] Lougheed did it, Howard Teprning did it, Morgan Weistling was doing it…it seemed like a good path for me,” he says. After a year, and not much money to show for it, he abandoned illustration and turned his attention to plein air, which helped bring him around to Western landscapes, and eventually Western subject matter. He would also start working in Frank Tenney Johnson’s famous Champion Place studio in Alhambra, where Johnson would entertain artists such as Norman Rockwell, Marjorie Reed, Victor Clyde Forsythe, Jack Wilkinson Smith and others.
Not long after, he encountered Glenn Dean, another artist who was about to make a big break into Western art. “Glenn was doing these amazing little paintings at the time,” Solliday says. “Glenn wasn’t known at all at the time, and I was barely making any money at all, but there we were showing together.”
Dean recalls their encounter at that early show in their careers, and today looks at Solliday’s work with fondness. “Tim’s work captures the energy of his subjects with strength
of color, draftsmanship, paint handling and sound design,” he says. “Tim’s work has always appealed to me and continues to stand out among the artists working today.”
Today, Solliday is an enigma in the Western market. He doesn’t produce a lot of work, but what he does make excites and thrills collectors, who are drawn to his bright color, stylized figures and flat renderings. The show at Maxwell Alexander, which will certainly be one of the largest bodies of work he’s ever shown at once, is already generating a buzz that suggests Solliday might be on the edge of some of the most important work of his career. New works in the show include Cattle Drive, which shows a variety of figures and animals pushing through the sage and sand as they journey West, and War Party, a massive 60-inch-wide image showing four warriors leaving camp as two women and the chief come to see them off.
When pointed out that all his figures seem to be riding left to right, Solliday admits it’s likely because he’s left-handed and prefers to paint in a direction that creates a comfortable painting position for his arm and hand.
More than the direction of the figures though, the thing that stands out most is the flat rendering of the subjects within Solliday’s scenes.
“It all goes back to my love of murals, and maybe even those billboards,” he says. “Frank Brangwyn and Dean Cornwell…it goes back to them. What they were doing was presenting well-modeled figures in a flat presentation. You see that with Wyeth, Pyle and some of those other guys. Even someone like J.C. Leyendecker, he was using classic mural principles to create flat renderings. Logan [Maxwell Hagege] does some of this kind of work. For me, I want my work to not fall off the wall, but also stay part of the wall while still modeling the truth and beauty of the subjects. It’s exciting trying to find that balance every day in my studio.”