and his family visited Brown County and the state park often.
“ I was about four years old the first time I saw the Brown County State Park vistas— and I was amazed by the views. Growing up in Indy, there was nothing like it,” Tim said. Art was a passion from a young age for Tim.“ Our house was not close to other houses, so I didn’ t have a lot of friends to play with. Instead, I would draw, and I got pretty good at it,” Tim said. He also spent a lot of time playing the piano.“ I took my first piano lesson when I was 8 and instantly fell in love,” Tim said.“ By the time I was 12, I was playing concertos with the Indianapolis Symphony.”
After high school, Tim studied piano at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and then graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania.
By the age of 40, Tim had achieved national recognition as a composer of contemporary orchestral and chamber music. He was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and guest lecturer at Swarthmore College and Princeton University.
But the pull of art was still in the back of his mind. Tim and his wife Lisa also recognized that they were ready for a change in scenery.
“ I started thinking,‘ If I’ m ever going to give art a try, I better start now. You only get one life, you know,” Tim said.“ When you are young, living in a big city is fun, but as I got older I realized that I needed some space. I was tired of the concrete society.”
The couple moved to their secluded Brown County home in 2001.
“ It was exactly what we needed. It gave us such a calm, relaxed feeling,” Tim said.“ And there was a lot going on in the arts.”
Unlike his music career, Tim taught himself everything he knows about art.
“ I became particularly fascinated with Monet,” he said.“ I would go to museums and study his brush strokes and then come home and research and teach myself.”
In 2019, after nearly 20 years of practice, Tim came up with an idea to showcase both his work and a local landmark.
“ I had revisited Monet’ s“ series” paintings. Monet became fascinated with the idea of
multiple paintings of a single subject under different effects of light( time of day, season, etc.),” Tim said.“ Inspired by Monet’ s experiments, I came up with the idea to paint the vistas of Brown County State park in different seasons and in different light.”
Over the next two years, Tim visited the park more than 100 times, studying, photographing, and sketching the park’ s majestic landscapes.
“ When I found a vista I liked, I would visit it several times to view it in different seasons and in different light,” Tim said.“ I would then do a quick sketch for reference of what to include. I also took several pictures to help me recall specific structures in the hills and to help set the shadows, lighting, and colors. I quickly learned that studying how the light progressed and mental notes of the view were as important as my sketches and photos.”
Back at his home studio, Tim would combine the photographs and basic sketches into more refined sketches.
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July / August 2021 • Our Brown County 45