At first glance “Rowdy’s Place” looks like an abstract painting— a spare southwestern modern-ist color field with a restrained red and white palette, the white dripping down toward a horned bull skull in the center of the composition. On closer inspection, one realizes the piece is a photograph of a snow-covered roof dripping icicles over the brick-red wooden slats of a barn wall.It’s such a spare composition that the viewer is left with simple passages of texture and color: the shadow-striated red of the sun-soaked wall, the perforated white of the snowy roof, the jagged percussion of icicles as well as their fat shadows, the dark red of the roof, the perfectly bleached skull, and its meaty, almost life-like shadow.
Timothy Thimmes is a purist when it comes to light. A stickler for craft, Thimmes works to get the composition, shape, detail, and light right from the beginning of the process, rather than rely-ing simply on electronic post-processing and image enhancement. “It must be perfect from the start,” he says. Thimmes trained at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, earning a BFA in photography, after pivoting from an early educational direction that involved receiving aBS in business management from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He merged the two paths and went on to open his own studio in Los Angeles, with clients including Columbia Tri-Star, MGM, Orion Pictures, The Samuel Goldwyn Company, and others. He and his wife, Janet, moved to Summit County, where they opened a marketing and advertising agency, T SquaredStudios. Thimmes loves his life in Utah, where, in addition to taking photographs, he skis and raises llamas.
