Tim D’Agostino, b. USA 1972, is a New York City based artist, educated at The Educational Center for the Arts in New Haven, CT, The Museum School in Boston, MA, Scuolo Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence, Italy, and the School of Visual Arts in NYC. He is an adjunct lecturer at the City University of NY. D’Agostino’s work attempts to emphasize the expressive immediacy and liquidity of scenes, characters, and moments – often using Greek mythology as source material – and the inward expression of abstraction and atmosphere through brushwork, strength in presentation of color, composition, value, and the effects of the contrast between defined forms and obscured environmental elements. His work blends figuration, landscape, and abstraction, and recently, combinations of various media such as oil paint and soft pastel on textured surfaces. D’Agostino’s more recent works have focused on exploring personal interpretations of particular Greek myths. In these mythical (often tragic) figures such as Odysseus, Marsyas, Asterion, Icarus… D’Agostino is attracted by the fact that it seems that there is an invisible hand that guides their actions – as much or as little – as they try themselves to work with or against these forces. The artist assumes that this applies to many classical myths, and artists in general. Nature and landscape, expressed through abstraction, is, for him, the key to the stories, and serve as not only a backdrop, but as essential characters. “Landscape is the purest form of abstraction in art. We are all affected by our environment as elements of and within that environment. Light, color, form… all shape how we feel and how we respond to the space that we are in. I try to use landscape as an abstraction to translate myths, to shape the sentiment of the stories… and in fact landscape is often the silent character that holds the key to the motive forces of the narrative. What does it mean to be the god of the sun, or to exist at the center of a labyrinth? Transformation, or metamorphosis, is often an essential component of the material characters, as well as the landscape itself, and in turn the plasticity of paint and the illusion of the scene”.
