Tim Southall was born in Staffordshire and grew up on the edge of the heavy industrial heartlands of the Black Country. He studied Fine Art at Northumbria University and then printmaking at the Royal College of Art and l’école des beaux art, Paris. Based in London for twenty years, he taught at university level while maintaining a career as a professional artist before leaving the teaching profession and concentrating solely on making art. For the last 24 years he has split his time between Birmingham and Cadiz Province in southern Spain. He makes work that draws heavily on his imagination to create witty, narrative etchings and silkscreen prints. Tim is an elected member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers.

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“My work is figurative and generally uses a narrative framework to explore themes of our shared history, often with a strong character and emotional resonance. I enjoy playing with metaphor, scale and perspective, and creating images that at first seem intrinsically simple, but on closer inspection are complex.

My creative process reflects everyday life experiences which are often re-interpreted in an otherworldly context. I often reach back into my childhood experiences to reference a distant me, in a quest to find meaning in what I see here today. This distance offers a linear route of my life experience; from birth through to death and everything in between. From these experiences a spark of an idea moves from my mind into notes and jottings, which gradually come together to form compositions. Once I have a rough idea of what I am trying to say, I move directly onto making the piece of work. Much of my work is made in etching, along with a significant number of silkscreen prints.

Over the forty years since I first made a print, I continue to be intrigued and inspired into further experimentation in technique and process. I take great joy in setting myself harder goals, creating paths of greater difficulty, and triumphing over my inevitable failures. However, in the end, all that really matters to me is that the viewer has the opportunity to find their own meaning and value in the art that I make.”

Selected exhibitions include; Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2011/13/18/22/23/25; RE Originals, RE Summer Exhibition, Bankside Gallery; National Original Print Exhibition, Bankside Gallery, 2015/16/17; Etching: The Masters, Bankside Gallery, London; Royal West of England Annual Open, Bristol; The Discerning Eye, Mall Galleries, London; The Royal Society of British Artists, Mall Galleries, London; BPM 30th Anniversary Exhibition, Birmingham City Art Gallery.

Selected public collections include; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; National Print Archive, Scarborough; BP International, Brussels; Northern Arts, Newcastle-upon-Tyne; Darlington Museums and art galleries.