Tim Hussey’s Festival of Disruption

By Stephanie Hunt

Tim Hussey borrows at will. Tidbits from a yellowed report card scrounged from some dusty flea market bin. Torn pages of an old Boy’s Life magazine. Graphic elements from who knows what. He’ll snag inspiration and stylistic flare from his artistic mentors, adding his own distinct twists. “I’m always stealing from others,” he admits in the documentary, Running by Sight: The Art of Tim Hussey. So I don’t think twice about stealing the title of this profile from filmmaker David Lynch’s annual (well, from 2015 to 2018) creativity fest, a two-day eclectic buffet of multi-genre artistry.

Besides, Lynch is Hussey’s hero.

“He’s a big, big influence. I love that Lynch is this nice guy, this nicely dressed gentleman, but he has this beautiful darkness to his work,” says Hussey from his home studio in downtown Charleston. He and his wife Elise and two young daughters live in a hip, historic home where art abounds amidst Architectural Digest-ready rooms. “I want to enjoy life on the surface as a normal person, but as an artist I want to dive down into that darkness,” he adds.

So dive he does. A lifelong surfer, Hussey knows how to duck dive under Folly’s crashing waves. And knows, too, that down in the murky darkness below the water’s froth an alluring calmness beckons. He knows that to catch a wave, to get into a flow—creative, playful, athletic—you have tousle around above and below the surface. Dive down. Paddle, and paint, like hell.

Hussey, a Lowcountry native and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) grad who has lived in New York, LA, Santa Fe, Europe, and has now been back in his hometown since 2000, minus a three-year stint in LA from 2012 to 21015. “It was important to me as an artist to prove myself as a big city contender,” he says. Prove he did. Hussey has made a national name for himself as a one-time MTV and magazine illustrator turned fine artist. He’s had solo gallery and museum shows in LA, Detroit, New York, Atlanta, Nashville and Charleston, a big 10-year retrospective in 2010, and has an impressive roster of collectors.

Hussey’s body of work is strong and distinct, bold and getting bolder. Abstract and head-scratchingly compelling, his large canvases and his smaller works on paper speak to this cultural moment in an oddly comforting way. In this world where not much else makes sense, Hussey’s work ricochets off the craziness with nonsensical beauty. It mirrors our fragmented, disjointed experiences and affirms that the absurd can be okay. More than okay. Glorious even.

As with any good festival, there’s plenty going on in Hussey’s work: lyricism, humor, a touch of the macabre, layered textures, strategic painterly exactitude, plus maybe a Carnie guy or two walking around hawking cheap tricks and cotton candy. And like Lynch’s Festival of Disruption, Hussey embraces the etymological essence of the word, disruption: to rupture, to rent, tear, break apart, interrupt the normal continuity, throw into disorder (thanks, OED). Yet not like a toddler throwing a tantrum (his adorable girls, Merrick and Leora, are 3 and 1 years-old, he gets plenty of that already). And not for the perverse pleasure of creating disorder, but to rupture in order to break something open and unleash something new, something fresh and demanding, stirring and unsettling.

Sunlight douses the airy second-floor studio where we chat about who Tim Hussey is these days, and how and why he does what he does.

How has the pandemic impacted you and your work?

I turned 50 in February, and for the first time in 17 years I had just accepted a full-time job, one with benefits and health insurance, because when you have kids, you start to think about those things. But two months later, thanks to Covid, it all dissolved, so it gave me a chance to reevaluate, and to think not so much about providing for my family but about my legacy. Did I want my girls to find some piece in the attic one day and say, “hey, I didn’t know Daddy painted?” I realized that maybe I was selling my soul at age 50, and instead I want to set an example for my girls of someone doing what they believe in. So I started to double down. I’ve got this big chance right now—what they see now at ages 1 and 3 will inform how they see the world. The pandemic hasn’t made things easy, but I’m staying positive. I’m at a place of feeling on top of my game more than ever. Feeling in touch with my craft and my line and my compulsions to have certain kinds of contradicting elements in my work. It’s flowing a lot more clearly.

What is your studio time like? Your process?

Well, the other thing about turning 50 and having young kids is there are plenty of distractions. And then add a pandemic on top of that! It’s a nursery here—which I love, don’t get me wrong, but it’s hard to get momentum, and once I’m out of a continuum it’s hard to get back to where you were—like trying to remember where you were in a book you put down. I would love to say I’m that artist who works everyday, but I’m not necessarily. If the girls are here, it’s hard but when Elise takes them to see their grandparents, I work long hours, often starting a piece outside here on the piazza.

Audience is important to me, but what motivates me is bodies of work and goals. It’s not that fun for me just to paint. It’s hard. Painting is not a thrill for me, the thrill is in experiencing these a ha moments, but then I second-guess it. It’s not that I’m in love with paint and with painting, it just happens to be the one thing, for better or for worse, that I discovered as a way to illustrate my compulsions, my brain. The medium is incidental—somebody put a drawing pad in front of me when I was little, and I got positive attention, and then more positive attention for it, and over time, my ego got wrapped around applying things visually. But if I had been given musical instruments, I think my medium could have just as easily been music. For me painting is just a way of explaining how my brain works, how my emotions work and how I see the world.

Do you begin a work with a sense of what you want to say, or does it evolve?

After RISD, I got a job as an illustrator in New York City, and I was good at it, but I hated working for art directors or sticking to a theme at all. My brain wanted to just respond to what I saw. My (illustration) work did well; I won awards, but I was known to be hard to work with—to get the best work out of me you had to let me just do whatever. Now, that’s what I do. My painting is very much a discovery process. When I’m drawing or painting, it feels like I’m scratching this strange itch. When a composition isn’t right, I can feel it in my body. There’s a tension in a painting, and truly for me, if that tension is off it compulsively bothers me—like a sensation inside that can feel hot or cold or itchy.

If I feel like there’s a contrived attitude behind any color, any line in a painting, I justify it and neutralize it by adding in something contrary to the contrived moment, so they work together. It’s like a chess game for me. I’m not trying to get ideas across; I’m trying to take what I know, what I’ve learned through my lifetime in art, in school, and incorporate what I’ve learned from my parents and from paying attention to my compulsions. I’m often creating accidental juxtapositions, taking unexpected turns so something that doesn’t necessarily belong together becomes it’s own beautiful moment. My work is this layered process, where the subject becomes the ground and the ground becomes subject and you get this narrative that you neither know where it started or where it’s going, nor does it necessarily make sense, but only points to several narratives that could be happening. To me that’s enough.

<As we wind up, the studio door opens as if on cue, and Leora, fresh from a nap and wearing only a diaper, toddles over to plop on her dad’s lap, her sweet baby feet stepping on the edge of one of Tim’s finished works on paper that he’s set out for me to see. It’s all here—the spontaneous messiness of real life, the conflation of art and reality and (clean) baby toes—and it’s the perfect segue to this question.>  What does disruption mean to you?

My disruption for the world would be to say that life is not that simple but also in way, it is simple and beautiful, we just have too many things running around in our unconscious to see it sometimes. My work is not about trying to do something dark or weird, but I like that people can’t necessarily figure it out or pigeon hole it. It’s like the Buddhist saying—that everything is suffering and everything is beautiful at the same time. I guess that’s my disruption, to enjoy finding a beautiful moment in everything that’s out there.