bio

EXHIBITS
• Utah State Capitol juried Art Exhibit, Salt Lake City, Utah 1 purchase
• Wheeler Library Art Exhibit, North Stonington, CT 4 purchases
• Cranston Street Armory Exhibit, Providence, RI 2016 1 purchase
• Rhode Island Education Fund Exhibit, 2017 1 purchase
• Providence Center for Photographic Arts, Providence, RI member show 2017, 2018
• Pandion Gallery, Fishers Island, NY 2018, 2019 5 purchases
• Pawtucket Arts Collaborative, Pawtucket, RI member show 2018
• Roger Williams Medical Center 2018, Providence, RI Thirteen piece one person exhibit Public Art Works of Rhode Island
• Women and Infants Hospital 2019, Providence, RI Twelve piece one person exhibit, Women and Infants Art Consultancy
• Open Studio Pawtucket Art Galleries 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 1 purchase
Tolman’s paintings are in many private collections throughout the United States

STATEMENT
Tim Tolman’s artwork features both mixed media collage and oil painting on panel. The work is about how a painting can produce the evidence of its own creation, the time it takes to apply the materials and the marks on the surface that reveal the process. The layers tell the story of construction from flat planes of paper act as visual interruptions to the painted dimensional space. The push and pull leads to a sort of visual entropy, a tangled statement. Ideally, this creates the perception of a visual time loop.

PERSONAL HISTORY
Tolman grew up in Salt Lake City, and studied painting and drawing at the University of Utah with V Douglass Snow, F Anthony Smith and Alvin Gittins. After undergraduate school, Tolman had an early career as a pictorial painter of billboards for outdoor advertising companies in the west. Tolman turned from painting billboards to designing them. This eventually led to relocating to Providence, Rhode Island and becoming a Creative Director at The Providence Journal Company. He directed their pre-internet project called videotext, which combined text and image simply like billboards. Being on the cusp of computer graphics, it led to a successful career as a Creative Director for his own company, where he was an early adopter of interactive digital technology for video, animation, audio, and the migration of digital print design. Tolman worked with corporations, network and public television stations, leading universities, and local businesses. He was part of the team that launched the Food Network. He taught the first page design course at the Rhode Island School of Design on the MacPlus 1986 where continued to teach as an adjunct faculty member for twenty years.

Throughout his career, Tolman has been fascinated with the gestalt of billboard design—merging idea, copy and image into a singular message. Years of experience with image, composition, color, and scale made the move to painting a natural progression. By 2015, Tolman turned away from commercial design to become a full-time painter.