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When T. Hallenbeck was growing up in The Great State of Ohio, his parents used to put him and his younger brother Mike on a bus at
8 a.m. on Saturday mornings for a forty-minute ride south from his sleppy little hometown to the Columbus College of Art and Design.
To date, those weekend youth classes were T. Hallenbeck's only formal training in the visual arts.
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As an artist, most of T. Hallenbeck's habits and methodologies have evolved from his experience as a musician. At an early age, he
was fortunate to have been exposed to classical music training as a cellist and a singer, and later to popular forms as a guitarist,
mandolinist, and mountain dulcimer player. While learning to read music and understand music theory, Hallenbeck was exposed to
the obsessiveness and attention to detail that pervade those disciplines. And during his years of performing on various instruments,
he has explored how individual voices, structures, and themes mesh together to form interlocking systems.
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This attention to detail tends to kick in when Hallenbeck draws or paints - he concentrates on the minutiae of lines, shades, shapes,
and volumes, and lets the overall piece evolve out of the details. Hallenbeck describes himself as an "idiot-savant" artist
whose biggest challenge is "not getting lost in the forest from worrying too much about the trees." Over the years, Hallenbeck
has maintained an interest in religious iconography, particularly as found in Byzantine, early Christian, Inca and Mayan, and Southeast
Asian cultures. He describes his own artwork as iconographic in the sense that it is more articulation than depiction, expression, or
revealation.
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Hallenbeck brandishes a brush every few months between musical projects, and has recently taken to metal sculpture after becoming
involved with The Crucible, a nonprofit industrial arts education center in Oakland, California. He lives in Oakland with his wife,
artist Reshma Azmi. Their home is crammed to overflowing
with half-finished masterpieces.
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T.H., awake,
with seat belt |
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T.H., asleep,
no seat belt |
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