User:Timthestoneguy/sandbox

"I am not trying to change the world with my work; I am trying to move it". Tim de Christopher, 2000

In recent years Tim de Christopher has been developing increasingly large and more complex site-specific narrative installations in stone and steel. While working very much in the long tradition of narrative art, still he expresses himself in his own odd language of image and syntax and these projects invariably function, formally and substantively, on several levels simultaneously.

As narrative works they have evolved principally into stories of the human condition, sometimes well known stories and sometimes stories of his own making. As the works grow in size they begin telling many such stories at the same time, story within story, just as our own lives are composed of countless stories within stories. The sculptures themselves are spatially oriented, presenting the narrative in a sense "cinematically" and prompting the viewer to move around them, every step revealing new "scenes", in no particular or necessary order.

This story telling and physical movement incorporates time into the work as an inseparable element; they are choreographic and musical. The audience dances with the work without realizing it, subtly and quite naturally, creating their own histories by literally passing time and impressing memories. To view the work is like taking a walk through a city. It is always changing. In spite of the otherwise static nature of the material, the work embodies movement. There is always something new to see, unexpected moments of surprise.

de Christopher also has an obsession with architecture and the built environment. This undoubtedly comes from his childhood and the environment he was raised in. At the age of nine he was given a small drafting table for Christmas, a set of drafting tools, sheets of vellum, and basic plans to study and mimic. This, he claims, was when he started designing in earnest. He was also given architectural blueprint paper, which he exposed in sunlight and developed with water, making the connection for him between the mechanics of drafting and natural cause and effect, an alchemical fixing of ideas into images, a magical process of transformation and realization.

His father, Eugene de Christopher Sr., was a designer and commercial artist and when Tim was born his father and mother had created and were hosting an enormously successful children's television program. The program, It's Chris, taught kids drawing and painting using his father's design "toy", called "Chris Cuts", a set of basic shapes made from brightly colored felt used to create built up images from which to draw. Tim spent a large part of his infancy on the sidelines of a 1950's television studio, to which he attributes the start of his creative education.

In the early sixties his father developed his own version of the wooden building blocks we have all played with in school. He called them Arkitek Blocks™, a cornerstone in the product line of an educational toy company he created, Princeton Playthings. These blocks were fundamental in honing Tim's aesthetic awareness, his three-dimensional and spatial comprehension, and are seen as key in beginning his fascination with building.

His father's father came from Italy around 1910. Though he was never much of an actual, vital presence (as they lived on opposite coasts for most of their lives), he was nonetheless a pivotal figure in de Christopher's life. He grew up with stories of his grandfather the stone cutter, the church builder, the monument maker, and the carver of angels. It was through these stories that "I imagined the image of a sculptor, a stone carver, a builder of churches" but he had no idea what that meant really, what that looked like, what that really was, until he was much older and his grandfather was many years gone. But a seed had been planted.

de Christopher eventually went on to enter art school at The Cooper Union in New York City in the mid-seventies. This is where he started carving stone, quite naively, until he went to Italy himself to see what more he could learn. From college he ultimately went on to study Architecture in graduate school at Columbia University. One day, while waiting for the library at school to open, he ventured into the stoneyard at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which was very nearby. "I had decided to ask if they needed any carvers, as it was summer and I needed a job". It happened they were looking and after testing his mettle they decided to take him on. So that summer Tim de Christopher went to work at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and never returned to school.

He currently lives and works in Turners Falls, MA and enjoys a busy life in his own stoneyard and studio, as a sculptor, a stone carver, and builder of churches.