Tim Forbes

About Tim Forbes

“I like black. It is a colour that has made up its mind. It holds authoritative rebellion within the colour wheel. I am not a rebel, although a grade-school teacher once chided that I should ‘learn to colour within the lines’”. -Forbes

Born in Nova Scotia and precocious from the outset, Forbes dropped out of high school and shifted into the entertainment industry at seventeen years of age.  He worked as an agent to musicians at the age of eighteen and started a comprehensive design company in Nova Scotia when he was twenty-four.  He attended NSCAD during those years, but he was not interested in their conceptual emphasis at that time.  He has since circled back to this.  Moving to Toronto in 1978 Forbes soon launched an award-winning design company and collaborated with an astounding range of clients, from Royal Commissions and Provincial government organizations to Canada’s leading law firms, public and private corporations, as well as performing arts organizations and the Canadian film and television industry.

 Ironically, among the myriad of projects Forbes has undertaken, he is perhaps best unknown internationally for the original One-of-a-Kind Show logo, which is in fact his own thumbprint.

Stretching beyond the confines of an urban design studio, in 2006 Forbes created an annex studio at a 1920’s rural schoolhouse in Creemore, Ontario, investigating the haptic aspects of sculpture as a personal new dimension, soon after releasing a first edition of bronze works.

 With his painting, he explores scale and form.  They reflect contemporary minimalist modeling and are concerned with notions of repetition, patterning, and permanence.  They are imbued with the quality of essential form.

 Forbes approaches each medium slightly differently.

“In sculpture I work in maquette forms, small scale models in clay or metal that are then scaled proportionally using state-of-the art technology. I then rely on a team to realize the fabrication of large-scale works in resin, fiberglass, bronze, or steel. With paintings I tend to plot digitally to best understand the tension and relationships of the form, and how it reflects on others in a series. But once on the canvas the paint takes over.  Photography becomes more capricious counting on a career as an art director and designer with peripheral vision that quickly edits the mind’s eye. Images can be complex compositions of massive digital files. Or not. My preference is shooting in a single-point perspective to imply the dimension of a subject rather than exposing it."

 And of his art historical inspiration, this is how Forbes responds: “I tend not to have heroes but am moved by the power and purview of generations of artists: Cimabue, Etruscan bronze, permission from Picasso or Bacon, electrification from Mary Weatherford, sex from Ken Price, immersion from Julie Mehretu, tempo from Twombly, climax in Riopelle, transcendence from Soulages. The amalgam informs the subconscious.”-Forbes.

 After sharing his studio time between Toronto and his native Nova Scotia for many years, Forbes set up a permanent studio in Blue Rocks Nova Scotia in 2019.