It is the smell of leather that strikes you first, waiting for the phone booth-sized elevator to take you up to the fifth floor studio of Tim Daly. Perhaps there is something appropriately ironic about his settling into the old Newman Leather building in Hoboken, as if he and the building have become pieces of the area history. Daly says tours of people have been coming to see him lately some with as many as 40 people — all of whom have to take this same elevator up.
Once upstairs, the smell of paint replaces leather as Daly himself slides back the bolt on the frosted glass door leading to his abode. Silk screen equipment is everywhere. He makes half his income from doing screen work for posters and other items. Most recently, he did the posters for Ira Karasick’s campaign, a sign of his own political stand. Farther in, passed racks of canvases and across splintered wooden floors, a more brightly lighted room holds a small gallery of his work. Huge canvases hang on two walls like vast picture windows. One shows a black and red glimpse of a railroad bridge crossing over the meadows. It is immediately familiar to anyone who has wandered the reed bed and railroad tracks along south Secaucus.
“I’ve been doing a lot of scenes from along old Route 7,” Daly says, seating himself on a stool with his back to the windows. In front of him, another huge meadowlands scene, this one looking East across the Hackensack River, the vast expanse dwarfing the New York skyline which is a clutter in one corner of the painting. The size of these paintings are necessary to encompass the full impact of what is like standing on the shore.
“I play with scale,” he said, pointing towards the Twin Towers as if the painting was really a window or he had stood for hours in the mud to get perspective right.
Mostly, he sketches the scene on the spot and takes photos, then brings these back here where he can reproduce them on the larger scale. The railroad crossing and the meadowland painting are 5 by 7 feet. He said he can’t paint them any larger because he wouldn’t be able to get the canvases in his truck. His smaller painting vary in size. Some are 30 by 40 inches, others 22 by 30 inches. At the current show in Cooper Gallery called “Meadowlands” Daly features three of his behemoth works and seven smaller paintings and pastels.
Daly says his inspiration comes from knowing the area. “It takes me a long time to know how a place looks and find the oddball part of it which are the things that interest me,” he says, noting that his routine is one of driving out of town and parking his car. “I usually go until I hit water or something else I can’t get around,” he says. “I suppose I should buy a canoe.”
The three large paintings in the Cooper Gallery exhibit are from Route 7. He says they are images of earth, sky and water. “It’s the only place around here you can find them all in one place even if they are landfill,” he says
This round of his artistic life seems to be the seeking of high ground, places where these elements come together. While he is strictly a realistic painter, there are metaphoric elements in these works, especially in the bridges.
“In almost every culture bridges have significance to people,” Daly says. “As a sign of a journey or a marker in time.”
The bridges he’s painted have a built in sense of mystery and yet still exist in reality. He says he doesn’t paint with messages or narrative, nor is he after a totally visual effect. While he creates a vision, there is also some sense of the passage of time. He points towards the large bridge painting hanging from the far wall.
“It has those elements at work and I really didn’t intend it,” he says.
Looking for a subject
Daly moved to Hoboken about 15 years ago. While he grew up in neighboring Jersey City, he had a brief excursion into what he calls “the burbs” where he says he got bored.
“I was looking for a subject and discovered this area,” he says. There was never any question about style. He’s always been a realist at heart.
“I’ve admired conceptual art but never been tempted by it,” he says. His materials have always been pastels and acrylics. “I never learned to use oil in art school.”
Daly studied at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where he acquired the tools he needed to begin. He says he has no overall theme but works painting by painting.
“The more I work in the area the more I see,” he says, noting how things grow more intriguing as he wanders around. Some of his paintings are deliberately dark which he says emphasize the mystery of the night pieces. But even the brighter daylight images have a mood to them, cast by his limited use of color.
“The world is not brightly colored,” he says. “And it’s not right for me to bump up the color.”
While he uses a very formal style, much of what he paints comes by way of gut feeling for what may or may not work.
“Not everything works,” Daly says.
But he allows people to come to his work with their own personalities. He is not trying to elicit responses, but is often pleasantly surprised when they confirm what he is thinking.
Landscapes represent only part of his work. He also does interiors. A few of these hang off to one side, the angles in them combined with the shadowy effect and progressions of grey give these a strangely geometric touch without losing their realism. He says people have accused him of being all over the place. But he says variety is refreshing and he doesn’t want to repeat himself.
Hard times for art
Daly says art is going through some hard times.
“The art market fell off a cliff,” he says. “It shouldn’t effect me. I’m not in the blue chips.”
Yet he says there’s bound to be a trickle down effect among buyers who have been using painting as an investment.
“People in the past who invested in art will hear the art market is dead and will be afraid to spend,” Daly says, expressing mixed feelings about it. “In one respect, people will get true value for the work. Before this, the market was fueled by money, not art. Now people will buy because they like what they see.”
Daly encourages people not to be afraid.
“If you like a piece of art, buy it,” he says.
H4>Doing his own thing
While there are many artists he admires, he says few have really influenced him. Yet one can’t help but see touches of Hopper, Whistler and the Hudson School in his landscapes. Indeed, these are among the names he mentions.
Although he rarely paints people, he may do some soon, conceding that they will be part of a landscape. While he has no ax to grind with the post modernists he finds himself influenced more by the great painters of the past than current trends.
“Trends last about 6 months and can’t be sustained,” he says. He does, however, keep track of them
The Cooper Gallery show is the most recent in a number of exhibits including a one-man show at the Morris Museum in Morristown in 1990, group shows at CB’s 313 Gallery in New York in 1992, The Squibb Gallery in Princeton in 1991 and others.
He has sold work fairly extensively to both public and private collections including Newark Public Library, Rutgers University, Coopers & Lybrand, Alexander Kosolopov, Malcolm Forbes and Prudential Insurance as well as smaller collectors.
“Some people in Hoboken own a few of my paintings but they’ve run out of room to hang them,” Daly says.
“Meadowlands” will be on exhibit at Cooper Gallery through Wednesday, June 30th.