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Mr. "Tim" Hooper grew up in Nashville, TN in the '70s and '80s - a typical middle-class kid who watched way too much TV. His first artistic endeavors were drawing on the walls of his closet with a purple crayon, copying characters from the funny pages and rendering all four members of Kiss. In high school, some kid brought a R. Crumb comic book to school. Crumb's art had a huge impact on him and inspired him to become a cartoonist. He spent his twenties creating comics and trying to get them published (with little success). Drawing countless comic strips and teaching himself to draw was the best training he could have had. Self-training enabled him to develop a unique style filled with peculiar relationships between scale and proportion mixed with an odd sense of perspective. By the time he finally got around to going to college, he had a pretty clear vision of what he wanted his art to be.
After college, a myriad of low paying, dead-end jobs, and limited prospects in the cartooning business, he picked up a paint brush and began to paint in 1998. His paintings are an extension of what he was doing as a cartoonist, though not quite the same linear narrative as comic strips. Again, through self-training his paintings have evolved into distinctive artwork.
Mr. Hooper? For years while he was doing comix and graffiti, he operated under several pseudonyms. He never intended to be a painter who operated under a pseudonym. However, he had a teacher in college who addressed everyone by last name. The parallel between him being Mr. Hooper and the character on Sesame Street (also named Mr. Hooper) was irresistible to his classmates. The nickname stuck with him and he began to sign prints and eventually paintings with Mr. Hooper.
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