Tim Clayton
I began my art journey when I traveled to Florence, Italy to study at the Florence Academy of Art in 2001. Undertaking a classical education was extremely challenging and rewarding. Many of the concepts I learned in the studio shape my current outdoor painting as I continue to strive to find harmony in value, shape, and color.
I naturally gravitated toward landscape painting during my time in Florence and afterwards. I love to be outdoors and learning to paint outside introduced a little more freedom into my painting experience, while building on the principles I had learned in the studio. I spent many of my weekends in Florence hiking around the hills with my French easel.
Today, I hike around the hills of Maryland and West Virginia, finding scenes that I find interesting and doing sketches. Sometimes, the sketch is the end product and other times I do larger paintings based on sketches. Landscape painting for me is truly an endless challenge and I love to find the beauty in nature and share what I see with others. I look for some combination of a naturalistic representation of a scene along with my emotional response to the landscape.
I live in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, with my wife, Janice, and our two children whom I adore.