Tim B. Walker | The Fragile/Strong Series
A showing of paintings, January through March, 2025
Artist’s reception Monday, January 13, 5pm to 7pm
Hosted by Arsaga’s Mill District
481 South School Avenue, Fayetteville, AR 72701
About the Artist
Tim Walker is a principal and Chief Creative Officer of DOXA/VANTAGE, an award-winning full service marketing and design agency based in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He’s an Arkansas native, a graduate of Arkansas State University, and worked in advertising, printing, and higher education before starting his own firm in 1992.
Tim’s work as a designer and creative director has been awarded by inclusion in the Communication Arts Design Annual, PRINT Regional Design Annual, HOW, Step-By-Step Graphics, Graphic Design USA, the Society of Publication Designers Annual, and numerous peer professional organizations. He served as the inaugural president of the Northwest Arkansas chapter of AIGA, has served as an adjunct instructor of graphic design for both the University of Arkansas and John Brown University, and served on the professional advisory boards for The University of Arkansas School of Art and the Fay Jones School of Architecture + Design.
Tim’s undergraduate education was based in studio art with an emphasis in graphic design and he has only recently returned to his personal work in painting after nearly 30 years of setting it aside to build a company. Those three decades of design practice have informed his newly evolving career as a painter with unique views on composition, color, and subject matter.
About the Fragile/Strong Series of Paintings
My current series of paintings attempts to reckon with an evolving understanding of gender socialization by exploring the contrast between qualities of strength and fragility and questioning the mythology of their traditional alignment with gender roles. These qualities are explored using specific objects in still life form.
The tools used as subjects in this series, passed to me from my father after his death, serve as talismans for his example of masculinity through my own experience of growing up in the rural south. Confronted with his illness and death from cancer, the man who I had always associated with great strength began to reveal the inevitable frailty we all face someday, while my mother revealed her great strength and resolve in the face of losing her lifelong partner. The resulting emotional struggle of that time inspired this series of work as a means of processing my own reckoning with the mythological idea of the invincible masculine.
Tools are imbued with strength specific to purpose. Eggs, while commonly considered fragile, protect and nurture life and are imbued with their own strength specific to purpose. Through the discipline and formality of contemporary realism, my aim is to present these objects in a way that startles the viewer and encourages the pondering of cultural assumptions about gender ownership of these qualities.