PAINTER. WUPPERTAL. GERMANY.
My name is Tim Sandow, I was born in 1988 in Wolgast, Germany. I currently live in Wuppertal, which is close to Cologne and Düsseldorf. I live here with my girlfriend and our two dogs. Sometimes there are three dogs at our home, cause we offer a foster home for dogs in cooperation with an animal protection association from Romania. Accordingly, I am also badly dressed every day.
My grandfather is a classic old school landscape painter, so he was of course the first connection to skills and knowledge of paintings. I also remember long car journeys with him, to do plein-air painting. But we had lot of trouble situations with each other in his studio. As a teenager I was more into reading and drawing cartoons and watching movies, creating graphic designs (stuff like that), than getting mentally touched by the potential of a painting. But for learning the ability of self-creation and of course for my final self-determination, all these different pictorial experiences at my grandfathers studio have been existential for what I am doing today.
I think an essential point is that too many influences can determine your work in a bad way. Which means, that you can lose track of the point that it may have been about in the beginning. Your own work will be lost when you only follow external impulses from things you have seen in your surroundings. Only you can define the level of appropriateness in your imagery.
I put a lot of theoretical thoughts into my pictures. The “establishment” of every subject is arranged in a complex manner, like a scene design. For that, I use photographs, screenshots, sketches and so on. Everything has to be understood like I can move confidently through space. I need to be the owner of the scene before I start. As a painter I see myself as a screenwriter, director, set designer and stylist at the same time.
It is the longing for identity and truth I’m related to. I’m thankful to Daniel Richter, my Grandpa Bodo, Siegfried Anzinger and Katja Pfeiffer. They have been great teachers.
Fortunately my studio is not far from my apartment. Once it was used as an Mediterranean fast-food takeout. Parts of the kitchen are still in there.
This is generally difficult to explain. Because in my opinion art in this times only depends on the institution (for example art academy) and the market. It has lost its true relevance for outstanding people (us) and claims a cultural mandate for itself which is only very threadbare. Maybe I get the impression that art is useless and just a product. But I think it may change when the author is not as important as the thing itself, which communicates exclusively through aesthetics and demand on a cognitive process.
For me, I know that I need images to communicate and to shape the world. But as you can read, my intention is already a contradiction, because after all, the painting which I do, is part of the great art.
