Bob Timberlake is a collector of many things.  Here he is sitting in an antique three corner chair, which is constructed as it is in order that a gentleman could sit down without skewering himself with his sword!    The story of Bob Timberlake the artist is an interesting one, with many twists and turns, and I can only hope here to tell you a few highlights. First of all you need to know that before about 1969,  Bob was a successful businessman in his family’s business, traveling around especially in the Piedmont Triad area.  He did not begin his adult life as a full time artist, though he had long shown artistic bent and inclination well before 1969.  But as he tells the story, there came a time when, as St. Paul put it, it became like fire in his bones– he had to devote most of his time to his art.  But as you will be aware, for every one artist who can make a living painting,  there are a dozen who do not achieve that level of success.  And what happened to Bob is a tale that Mr. Wesley would say involved a chain of singular providences in his life. 

First of all, Bob, unlike many other artists had the support and love of his family when it came time for him to place being an artist front and center in his life.  Not only his wife Kay, but also his father gave his full blessing to this course of action.

I was especially moved by Bob’s telling of how his father drove with him all the way to Pennsylvania to the Wyeth compound so that he could see Andrew Wyeth and find out if somone he admired thought that he could make a go of being a full time full fledged visual artist. It was his father as well who road with him all the way to New York to see if it might be possible to convince the Hammers, in this case Victor to take some of his paintings and show them and sell them.  

With Wyeth’s encouragement Bob had gone to NY with paintings in hand (six) hoping just to get a couple of galleries interested in taking his paintings.   As he tells the tale, the day he got to Hammer  gallery when he walked into the shop, Victor was just leaving, took a cursory look at the paintings, liked them and told Bob— “leave them for us.”    Later, when he talked to the secretary, she told him— “do you realize what just happened?”   “No,” said Bob.  “What?”   “This was the first day in many months that Mr. Hammer has been in the gallery, and that pile over there is a pile of portfolios of artists waiting and hoping to get him to look at, and take their art on consigment. You just went to the front of the line, in five minutes flat.”   

I believe at various junctures you can see God’s hand on Bob guiding him in this process, for Bob was certainly naive, as he says himself, and an ingenue when he set out on this journey to making a living on the basis of his visual imagination and its artistic representation.  What in fact happened was that Dr. Armand Hammer became in essence Bob’s patron, taking him to amazing places to meet people like Prince Charles in Buckingham Palace and Begin and Sadat in the White House.  And yet interestingly, on the day that the other shoe dropped and Dr. Hammer, while he and Bob were flying on one of his private jets, finally said “it is time we had a formal financial arrangement”  an arrangement that Bob would have had a hard time turning down considering all that Hammer had already done to forward his artistic career,  by yet another providence of God  Hammer had been sent the wrong contract by his secretary, for Bob to sign, and so he did not, and remained a free agent, able to pursue his own muse in his own way and pace.  It was a crucial moment in his life.

Like many artists Bob is a sensitive person, and unlike some he is not only very gracious with his time, he is quite loquacious as well, though you can tell he is also a somewhat shy man who loves his time apart and alone, with just himself and his work.   He told me about being awakened in the middle of night with an image or an inspiration, but as often as not they come to him simple by his enjoying his surroundings, and surrounding himself with aesthetically stimulating things, books, subjects.  In the windows of his studio, he has actually etched in glass famous sayings of various people…..like by Robert Frost. And hanging directly over his huge family dining table made of beautiful N.C. cherry wood  there is the famous verse from Hebrews about hospitality– see below.

Bob’s studio is a minature museum of sorts.  And you can also tell from this picture how much he loves boats as well. 

But Bob’s story does not stop with just his painting, for he also came up with a line of beautiful N.C. furniture. Indeed, the only company still making furniture in Lexington, sadly and tragically, is the one that makes the Timberlake line, and that too would have been closed and shipped overseas if Bob had not objected and become involved in litigation to keep his operation housed in Lexington and employing his neighbors.  In an era of corporate greed and the raping of the once proud furniture industry of North Carolina, Bob took an ethical stand saying— “we are not going to outsource these jobs and put my neighbors out of work.” Sadly, he is about the last man standing in the Piedmont who has taken such a stand.  And this too reflects his Christian character.  He will not cater to the lust for cheap goods at the expense of his fellow Lexingtonians who create the art and artistry of the furniture he envisions and loves.   Yes, there is much to admire in this man.

Bob’s aesthetic sensiblities are also so clear in his gallery in Lexington which we also visited. Look for example at the following windows and works of art…

 
The Madonna and child sketched in a vision of light.

 
 

In Bob’s soul beauty and truth and graciousness are clearly closely aligned.  What a different world it is to enter his gallery or studio on the one hand (both places of beauty), and to comb the streets of Lexington with most of its huge furniture plants now dormant, shut, shuttered, rusting and rotting.  No wonder we sa
w some street preachers on the corners of downtown Lexington calling for repentance— repentance from a sort of greed and selfishness that puts individual gain over love of neighbor. 

If even a legless saved Vietnam vet can see the root of the problem lies in our self-centered souls, we must see it as well, and repent.  Lexington, in various ways is a living parable of why we had the economic crash last fall,  whereas Bob Timberlake, swimming against the cultural and business tide shows another way, a more excellent way, a more gracious way forward.   Whenever I go and watch artists like Bob, and those he employs to make his furniture  I think back to Jesus, and wonder– what he would have said as a carpenter if someone had told him— “I’m sorry but King Herod has decided that all furniture presently made in Galillee must now be made abroad, so that he can have more profits and sell more cheap goods.”

Think on these things.