Textile designer and artist Tim Van Campen lives in Thomaston in an 1820s center chimney Cape, the walls of which are covered with works by him as well as other artists, including his wife, Susan
Headley Van Campen, and his daughters, Greta and Molly. The floors also bear his rugs—the lamps, his shades. In the barn, multiple work and display areas—the old silo is a beautiful gallery-like space—speak to the union of function and beauty. For over 30 years, Van Campen has juggled what he describes as two careers, that of a designer of textiles and that of an artist. His work in both is marked by symmetry, balance, and the compelling power of the simple line.
Although he describes his vision as “geometric abstraction,” his inspiration, he says, is grounded in the natural world, including the land on which he lives with its gardens, rolling fields, and the banks of the Oyster River. A man who pays attention to the order of things, he says how his house set on the land, its place in nature, is what attracted him to the property.
Van Campen has developed designs for many companies, including Knoll, HBF, Durkin, Collins and Aikman, Hallmark, and Revman, as well as Michaelian and Kohlberg, which offers the Van Campen Collection and continues to translate his vision into rugs for all of his clients. They are hand-stitched in China, Nepal, and India over a six month period, the schedule often designed to coincide with a renovation or the completion of a new home. Although his work is seen in men’s silk neckties, socks, fabrics, bedding, rugs, and more, a number of his design ideas—for tiles, plates, scarves—have not yet found manufacturers.
The youngest of three children, Van Campen grew up in Endicott, New York, and graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the oldest art school/museum in the country, where he saw paintings every day, took classes amidst the best representations of the art world, and, after his third year, received a solo exhibition of his work. The Academy awarded him their European traveling scholarship—which enabled him to travel through Scandinavia and France—and a scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, which first brought him to Maine.
He divides his time between his design work, generated digitally, and his painting and mixed media work, combining archival pigment printing with airbrush and acrylic paint on canvas and paper.
He has received the AISD Interior Design Product Award, the Best of Neo Con Gold Award, Milliken Design Award, and the Interior Design Roscoe Award.
His paintings have been exhibited at many galleries in Maine, as well as across the country and in China. Represented by Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, his work is in private and corporate collections, including Cigna Corporation, General Motors, Rutgers University, IBM, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Where do you work?
There’s a studio down here [on the first floor between the house and the barn] that Susan and I share, but not at the same time. I have to have noise, and she likes the birds. I also have a room upstairs for my computer work. And when the weather is right, I work in the barn.
What do you mean by “computer work”?
That’s where I design the textiles, wallpaper, plates, my prints, aspects of my mixed media work, anything but the paintings. I play around in 15 or 20 configurations, rescale, do repeats, take an element and print it a little larger, see what else I could do with it. Here’s a needlepoint rug [hanging on the wall in the loft workspace in the barn]. This was hand-stitched in China, and every pixel pretty much translates into a stitch. Probably “Van Campen” is a swear word in China.
What is the rhythm of your work schedule?
Right now, I work early in the morning and then late afternoon and evening. I tend to go back and forth, doing computer things and painting. And I get more done fall to spring. There’s no garden or mowing [of the large property with paths weaving through and around and down to the river]. I enjoy those things, and I do them. Taking care of place is part of the creative process of my life.
Your paintings and your designs are clearly of the same language.
They may be, but they are two different careers. But with each I do begin in the same way—a blank screen or a blank canvas, with no preconceived notion. In painting, I work flat, and I have to be able to walk around all sides—often, I don’t even know which side is up until I am quite into it or maybe even done. The pace is slow. You have to wait for paint to dry. You hang it on the wall. You consider the next move.
On the computer, changes can happen so rapidly it’s like doing 50 paintings in an hour. The next move is only 10 seconds away.
Do you always know what the design will be used for?
Oh, no. Here’s a design [holds up a printout of a pattern] that I hope will be a scarf, not that I knew that when I made it, and even now I don’t know that a scarf will actually be its life.
Any formal training in textile design?
None, and that was, I think, to my advantage. I was working out of the box, which was also to my disadvantage. I’ve always been five years ahead of what’s coming, and the marketing piece has been a challenge. Marketing really could be a full-time job, plus it’s never been easy for me knocking on somebody’s door cold.
You design a lot of rugs. How did that happen?
I started fooling around with computers in 1987, and I was making all these designs, piles of them. Who do I show them to when I’m here in Maine? I wasn’t sure what the application should be or could be. Finally, I printed the designs out on regular paper, on a pretty crude printer at the time, and went to Surtex, the surface design show in New York. At this time, most of the companies had an art department that would hand-draw their designs. So it was the last day of the show, and I was thinking, “Boy, I just wasted a couple thousand dollars,” when a rug manufacturer came through and said, “I think some of your designs would make interesting rugs.” I’m still with that company.
Many hand-knotted rugs have 500 to 1,000 knots per square inch. How is that done?
Depending on the detail, the complexity of the design, the knot count can be quite high. The women who make the rugs—often now they are in Nepal—have finished school but have not yet married, and they come together quilting-bee-style to make the knots with Tibetan wools. Each one can do a couple square feet a week.
Your work has a strong sense of the physical and emotional architecture of a place.
Well, actually, growing up, my best friend and I would spread paper out on the ping-pong table and design whole cities, putting a gas station here, the food market over there. For a while, I wanted to be an architect, but my high school guidance counselor said, “With your math skills, forget it!” Even today, I walk around our house, constantly repositioning things, looking for the best order and placement.
What do you see as the connecting threads between your early paintings and the paintings you do now?
When I was still an art student, I bought a typewriter that had a large carriage and I started playing with it. The things were sort of like weavings, and I’d get in a little rhythm of, like, dot-dot-dot-space, dot-dot-dot-space. I’ve gone back to that and brought that full-circle in some of my work, combining printing and painting.
