1986

Reviews

“Hawkesworth’s Sower at Night reminds me of Soutine. It conveys a sense of something organic in extreme distress, for unclear reasons. It is about the uncanniness of suffering.”

– Donald Kuspit, Symposium at the MFA 1986

“Hawkesworth’s drawings from the Birth Series are for connoisseurs of abstraction. These figures in the squalor and ecstasy of lovemaking and giving birth recall images of the expulsion of Adam and Eve and might very well be the best works of expressionism made in Boston this time around.”

– David Bonetti. Art Critic, The Boston Pheonix

“His way of working draws on the methods and the sense of emotional necessity that motivated earlier periods of expressionism. This approach is modernist to the core, believing in the fusion of form and content. As such, it conveys one of the desires for painting at the present: that it can return to its primary concern for deep, existential meaning, even as these concerns are de-emphasized and de-valued by expressionist painters of other persuasions.”

– Elizabeth Sussmen. Curator, I.C.A. Boston

“Hawkesworth’s epic The Sower at Night is perhaps the most powerful work in these shows and one of the least specific. He uses black both in angry clouds and calligraphic gestures; his reds and pinks are raw. The 15-foot-long painting alive with storms of brushwork that look like the artist had been conducting a Wagnerian music-drama with a brush substituting for a baton. Ghostlike faces try to make their way through the paint to the surface of the picture. The painting reads as a monument to human suffering.”

– Christine Temin. Art Critic, The Boston Globe

“His painting Slouching towards Bethlehem shows his prowess well. The panel on the left depicts a loosely composed figure turning away to the viewer’s right from the cropped head of a horse. The central frame is dominated by a cross-like element rendered in deep tones. The last canvas is blurred, suggesting movement or chaos. There is anxious motion that carries the eye repeatedly through the series of images.”

– Marc Manheimer. Art Critic, Art New England

“Hawkesworth’s work centers on the body. The drawings reveal the nature of the aesthetic, while the paintings command the aesthetic with striking emotional intensity. The body logic of desire and emotion is only exceeded by itself when struck by pernicious illness. The intensity of the body is evident in Sower at Night and the painting Slouching Toward Bethlehem. The artist’s body gestures in this work, we sense a feeling that of a body: and bodily life itself, not the invisible body of science, but the body of copulation, pregnancy, birth and death –the regenerative and eternal spirit of life.”

– Timothy Norris, Freelance Writer

“It is a disturbing experience to enter the Image Gallery in Stockbridge and see the one-man show of Timothy Hawkesworth. These paintings and drawings jump out at you, frighten you, repel you, and finally draw you in. This exhibit is both thought-provoking and powerful.”

– Honey Sharp Lippman, Art Critic