Two artistic masters paint live at Townsend Atelier
This Friday the Townsend Atelier is offering a unique opportunity to study the process of two master painters, Timur Akhriev and Mia Bergeron. Located in the Arts Building on 11th Street, the Townsend is Chattanooga’s foremost private art education institution. For this free event, Timur and Mia will be doing a live demonstration, each painting a portrait of a model. Though their styles are similar, each has developed a distinctive approach to painting that is as personal as a fingerprint.
Mia’s paintings are stunning realist compositions that are beautifully executed and thought provoking. Her work as an artist involves a lot of thought, with each painting having a strong philosophical content. Her most recent series, “Shared Solitude”, is a courageous exploration of being alone and painting. The body of work is currently being exhibited in a solo show at Gallery 1261 in Denver.
Timur’s paintings are absolutely gorgeous. His canvasses catch the eye with confident yet sensitive explosions of color, evidence of a lifetime of practice and observation. His art has an enterprising spirit, and he is on a constant quest for new challenges. His work is currently represented by Lovetts Gallery in Tulsa, Gallery Russia in Scottsdale, and Abend Gallery in Denver.
Timur started his painting career in Russia when he was around the age of 10. He grew up watching his father Daud Akhriev and his artist friends paint in his studio. He went to a school that was specifically for arts training, spending seven years studying with a focus on fine art. He spent three years in the UTC Fine Art department before going to Italy to study at Florence Academy and the Charles H. Cecil Studio.
Mia also went to the Cecil Studio, leaving a year before Timur enrolled, after studying at the Rhode Island School of Design and Harvard Extension school. In fact, she was an assistant teacher at the Cecil. She continued her teaching career as an adjunct professor at UTC until 2010, when she relocated to the Townsend Atelier. She continues to teach painting classes there.
Timur and Mia are friends and colleagues, and the upcoming painting demonstration isn’t their first creative collaboration—for his most recent project, Timur uses Mia as one of his models, painting from photographs taken in milky water.
Standing above the models, he took pictures of their faces protruding from the surface. Choosing images to use as reference, he began developing a series of paintings.
The forms of the models’ faces are smoothly surrounded by sensitive interpretations of the surface of the water, giving the works an ethereal quality. One of the paintings is from a blurry photo that he selected to add a new level of difficulty to his process. “The challenge of it is there are no sharp features, so I’m trying to accomplish the blurriness with a water based medium.”
Timur has recently been infatuated with tempera, an egg-based paint that is water soluble. “I’m slowly switching to egg paint. I think it’s more archival than gouache, although I have always enjoyed designer’s gouache.”
Though their textures are similar, there is a significant difference in the color availability of gouache and tempera. With designer’s gouache, a full color spectrum is available, so the possible palettes are almost endless.
Tempera offers more of a restricted palette, but the pigments give the colors a distinctive richness and saturation—it was the most commonly used paint media until the renaissance, when oil became the industry standard. It is also long-lasting, with some surviving tempera paintings being over a thousand years old.
When tempera dries, the colors become different—for instance, the ultramarine blue looks dark when it is wet, but makes a tint as it dries. This quality causes an artist to need a good deal of experience with the medium to anticipate the color changes.
Though he does paint from life (he is a master of plein air), Timur enjoys some of the advantages of photography.
“In these contemporary times, the evolution of technology is giving you a chance to catch something in motion where you couldn’t before. I wouldn’t be able to stand over Mia for three hours in a bathtub.”
His series of bathtub paintings is shaping up to be a perfect example of how photography is changing the art of painting—but one thing will never change, and that is that once a photograph is developed, it’s done—but as Timur reminds us, “Painting is never really finished.”