John Tiney
My Reality, Your Reality, Its reality and Shirts
While constrained in dimension, form and material, a wide range of references are funnelled into the larger of Tiney’s paintings. Paint smears, corporate logos, ‘how to draw guides,’ infographics , caricatures, pop culture references, coffee beans, tea cups, beer cans and neon colours spill forwards; captured in paint and expressed skilfully through a curious but sympathetic blend of gestural, representational, printed and graphic mark-making.
The T-shirts are harvested from thrift stores and alike, picked out for their size and basic colour - the graphics (if any) are mainly secondary at this stage of the process - some shirts are bought for the graphic/branding alone, the jokers in the pack. A methodical process of archiving, collating, wearing, staining, screen-printing, stretching and treating T-shirts to form neatly-squared makeshift canvases, mainly produced in batches; has seen the artist evolve a ‘creative production line’ over several years, liberating himself from the measured pace of hand-painting as he resolves these art works with satisfying speed. The uniform dimensions of this series create a building block set to devise geometric formations in each new space, with a colour spectrum spanning 100 shades.
