WORDS Caroline Rosen PHOTOS Jon Kohn
Tim Vaught lives like a late 19th century English professor. Books are stacked on books, frames and unfinished paintings jut from every nook and cranny, mementos of a life lived fully spread themselves out across any flat surface. Cluttered, but not messy. On at least three occasions when I met Tim at his home, he would start talking about a book, and then miraculously reach into one pile or another, pull the book out, and then turn to the exact page that would illustrate his point. It felt like my favorite teacher had invited me over for tea.
Tim grew up a military brat, bouncing between El Paso, Texas and Montgomery, Alabama. Even as child, he knew he loved the woods more than the desert. Tim graduated high school in Troy, Alabama, then walked across the street and enrolled at Troy State as an undergrad. At Troy he decided to become an architect, but that required a move to another institution. His transfer to the University of Florida culminated in a life changing trip to Italy.
“The architecture program was based in a small town about 40 miles inland from Venice,” Vaught said, “we could get out of class, run like hell to the train station, spend all night in Venice with a $5 pizza slice and a bottle of wine, and then take the slow train back in. That was our Friday night out.” When he visits Venice today, he misses the mystique, the allure of a city at night when you are 23 and anything is possible.
The study of architecture eventually brought Tim to the Auburn Rural Studio, where he was one of the first students. His first professor was Samuel “Sambo” Mockbee. At the time, Tim commuted a few times a week from a house in Montgomery to the school in Greensboro. He would drive West in the morning, with the morning light, and he became fascinated with the color of the light on the landscape. He kept talking to Mockbee about the colors, and Sambo finally told him “you keep talking about the color on the landscape. Do something about it. Paint it.” A librarian with the program gave Tim a few tubes of paint, and he got started. He painted his first painting, and sold it in a matter of days.
But for the next two years, Tim tried to paint, and couldn’t. Looking for help, he took a class at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, and even though it was a beginning class, it was his launch point. His architecture background gave him a strong sense of composition, but he had no formal painting technique. The class provided him a primer on the fundamentals, and from there he just painted, and painted, and painted.
Tim got serious about painting in 2006, and in the back of his mind, he wondered if he could possibly paint for a living. It’s the siren song all artists who’ve yet to go pro hear, the internal whisper that maybe, just maybe, you could quit your real job and dedicate yourself to art. When the economy crashed a few years later, Tim didn’t have a choice. The architecture work he’d been doing dried up, and his architecture firm laid him off. Tim rolled with that punch, moving to Idaho to hone his craft with a major western landscaper.
In Idaho, Tim learned how to be an artist. He explained that it was not necessarily painting, “but the mindset, the approach, how to think about your art. You might have talent, but so many talented people don’t know how to push themselves, to market themselves. to think like an artist.” The artists out west taught Tim to practice, to practice something, anything. It doesn’t mean you’ll do anything with it, and you may spend five weeks painting the same thing, but it takes that dedication and craft before you know how to paint.
Tim’s passion is the shapes of trees, bare branches, branch structure, and how the organic nature of trees contrasts the rigidity and unforgiving nature of his prior architectural training. Look closely at Tim’s tree paintings and you will see his fascination with tree’s organic structure. Then, take a step back, look at the painting again, and realize that all of Tim’s tree paintings share another characteristic: the study of light in the trees. Since childhood, Tim has loved the woods more than the desert and you can see it in his paintings. Tim’s initial inspiration, the light in the trees, it is there in everything that he paints.