Green Line Cafe

We’re pleased to present Imitation Of Life , a selection of recent drawings from Pennsylvania-born San Francisco-based artist Timothy Buckwalter. The show will be on view March 12-May 2, 2010 at The Green Line Cafe | Locust. An opening reception for the exhibition is March 12 from 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm.

Chosen from Buckwalter’s archive of more than 800 works on paper, Imitation Of Life features some 80 highlights from Buckwalter’s last five years of ink drawings. To produce his word-based drawings, Buckwalter sorts through old comic strips, hacking out bits of dialogue that offer insight, often in a humorous vein, into universal- or self-understanding. The phrases are abbreviated and edited on a computer, resized, and then hand-painted onto sheets of paper. The resulting expressions hover somewhere in the grey area between self-loathing, self-loving, anger, and despair.

For his installation at The Green Line Cafe, the artist intends to cover the walls top to bottom with ink-drawn statements and declarations, freezing what might be fragments of coffee-shop conversation, heard or imagined, onto the permanence of the page.

A longtime believer in creating affordable art, Buckwalter will make the works in Imitation Of Life available for $25-$30, and will donate a portion of the sales from the exhibition to the West Philly Tool Library. The Tool Library loans tools to community members so they can perform basic home maintenance, tend their yards and gardens, build furniture, start projects, and learn new skills in a safe and affordable manner.

In 2005, Buckwalter was evicted from his warehouse studio in West Berkeley to make way for live-works that were never built. Along with his space of 12 years, he abruptly lost the psychic ability to paint. Fortuitously, one evening while reading through a compilation of comic strips, Buckwalter noticed that a particular phrase removed from its context sounded and looked really funny. Soon he was cranking out ink drawings. A year later, Buckwalter started posting a weekly online exhibition of the previous week’s efforts. As the show began to grow more successful (at its height more than 900 people subscribed to it) and more labor-intensive, he came up with the idea of inviting his friends to curate the shows. Among the list of guest curators are a number of Philadelphians: Artblog’s Libby Rosof and Roberta Fallon, artist Tim McFarlane and Dead Milkmen drummer Dean Sabatino.

Originally from Pennsylvania, Timothy Buckwalter (born 1966) now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He graduated from Tyler School of Art. Buckwalter has been included in the Linz Biennale and exhibited in New York, Portland, Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco. In Philadelphia, he has shown at Momenta Art and Vox Populi. He has written about art for The East Bay Monthly, KQED TV9, and San Francisco Chronicle.