Reveries realized Artist transforms imaginative visions of everyday urban scenes into vibrant, detailed ink-and-wash canvases The Creators
By: AV Kitching Posted: 2:00 AM CDT Saturday, Jul. 13, 2024

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This article was published 13/07/2024 (421 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Tim Toews has a knack for spotting beauty in the mundane.

His paintings of Winnipeg, line drawings in black waterproof ink with watercolour washes in soft pinks, hazy yellows and moody blues, imbue the city with an air of romance.

Motivated by a desire to be surprised by the familiar, traffic lights, road signs, graffitied walls, fire hydrants and lamp posts are all given the Toews treatment, transformed into sublime vignettes under his deft pen and brush skills.

There’s a dreamy quality to the art he makes, paintings which gently nudge you to view Winnipeg from his perspective.

“As Winnipeggers we need to think of our city as beautiful. I like to find the beauty in what others consider normal. I love the details, I think we can find beauty in everything if we look for it, and I don’t think we look for it often enough,” he says.

The self-taught artist started his career working as an architectural illustrator for a firm in Vancouver. His masterful rendering of buildings is second nature after years of practice. But painting didn’t come easy; it wasn’t something he was comfortable doing at first.

His skill with colour becomes all the more impressive when you discover he can’t quite see them; Toews is colour-blind.

“It was difficult for me. In in my 20s when I worked out in Vancouver, I had to learn how to get around my colour-blindness. I had to create colour renderings and I couldn’t just rely on my black-and-white skills. I had a lot of feedback and help from the artists I was working with.

“I always have to have labelled equipment. All my paint and markers are labelled, any pencil crayons have to be labelled. I’ve also learned how to mix colours, and because of my colour-blindness, I am better at creating value (contrast) in my paintings,” he says.

The self-taught artist, who teaches art by day at Calvin Christian Collegiate in Transcona, started drawing in elementary school after his mother handed him a sheaf of newspaper clippings by local artist Julie Dale, whose weekly drawings appeared in the Free Press.

“There was a feature in the ’70s called Sketchbook and my mother would cut out all these drawings by Julie. One day she gave me the clippings and asked me to draw them for fun. So that’s what I started doing.

“When I talk about my influences, she was a very early influence, and my drawing style looks very much like hers. I feel like it is a bit of a full-circle moment when you contacted me,” he says with a laugh.

He is currently working on a series of paintings of diners and is keen on doing more rural landscapes, painting the barns, farmsteads and grain elevators dotted around the Prairies.

He posts pictures of his 8-by-8-inch canvases on his instagram @timtoewsart, updating the page every time he completes a new work, and also has some prints up in Más Coffee Co. on Arthur Street.

He’d like to tackle parts of the city we often walk past without a second glance, aspects we may not appreciate as much, he says.

“I want to encourage people to realize seeing beauty is important for their outlook on life. It is something that drives me. I find a joy, a peace in doing it. I feel like people are made to create and this is my way of creating new beauty and new ways to enjoy the world around us.”

av.kitching@freepress.mb.ca