Jazz and Still Life Part of New Jersey’s Newest Exhibit
(Mahwah) – A group of paintings incorporating jazz and still life is the theme of New Jersey’s Newest, an exhibit opening at the George T. Potter Library at Ramapo College of New Jersey Thursday, October 23. The exhibit, by local artist Tim Heins, a Hoboken resident, runs through December 12.
Tim Heins “is an intriguing painter who contains a great deal of painterly sensuality within a small picture plane,” says Sydney Jenkins, director of art galleries at Ramapo.
Record jackets are the common thread in his paintings. Among 12 still life paintings, seven include albums by jazz musicians. “I have always wanted to paint jazz musicians but had never figured out how until I began putting their albums in still lifes,” says the artist.
Heins loves jazz and considers record albums works of art in themselves. In creating a still life, he first places the record jackets and then surrounds them with familiar objects found around his studio. Some objects help to drive an implied narrative, others provide color or shape.
“The paintings become puzzles of theme and composition. As I paint them, I’m open to discovery, exiling objects, adding others,” says Heins, who by doing so builds an overall intensity in his work. “Each object becomes a performance of painting and also a performer in the composition. The negative space also serves a purpose, just as the silences in a Miles Davis solo.”
Heins’ experience with still life started at Mercer County Community College with the encouragement of one of his professors, Mel Leipzig. Later, Heins studied at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore, from which he received a bachelor of arts degree. Heins earned a Master of Fine Arts at Brooklyn College. The artist’s recent exhibits include Portraits at Urban Egyptian Gallery in Los Angeles, NJ Fine Arts Annual 2002 at the Morris Museum in Morristown and 9/11: Remembering and Healing at the Hudson County Courthouse Rotunda in Jersey City.
Heins also exhibited his art in a Ramapo College exhibit, Plots and Intentions, and elsewhere in New Jersey at, City Without Walls, New Jersey State Museum, The Trenton City Museum and The Gallery of South Orange; as well as at Art in General and Hanover Square Gallery in New York and Edit Art in Washington, DC.
New Jersey’s Newest is free and open to the public. The George T. Potter Library is open from 8 a.m. to midnight, Monday through Thursday; 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday; 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday; and noon to midnight Sunday. For more information, call 201. 684.7147.
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