Baker Artist Portfolios

Tim Jankowiak is a self-taught oil painter living and working in Baltimore. He focuses primarily on realistic and hyper-realistic approaches to representational art, though his subject matter varies widely. He is known for highly detailed urban landscapes, luminescent still lifes, and evocative figurative work. He is an unapologetic formalist, and aims first and foremost at filling the visual field with something delightful, sensuous, playful, and compelling.

Tim's technique is extremely time-intensive, with many pieces taking well over a hundred hours. He practices a multi-layered, "indirect" approach, making use of a modern synthetic form of "marojer" glazing medium. After an initial opaque layer, two or more gradually more transparent layers are added as the image is refined. This enables soft gradations, fine details, and shimmering optical effects. Since part of his technique involves actively hiding the brushstrokes with fine-grained smudging and smearing, the results are often mistaken for photographs or digital art.

Tim is also a professor of philosophy at Towson University. His artistic work and his philosophical work on the nature of sensory perception are in constant dialogue. An endless fascination with color and color vision is the main point of contact between the two pursuits. That being said, Tim's artistic practice serves as a counterpoint to his philosophical work. Where philosophy seeks to understand things through abstractions and universalities, Tim's focus on detailed representational art aims to celebrate his subjects in their particularity and uniqueness at a moment in time.