A designing mind: Tim Novara creates a surrealist world inspired by architecture and international travel – The San Diego Union-Tribune

It’s unsurprising to learn that Tim Novara’s favorite toys growing up were Legos. Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, he looked forward to trips into the city to take in the buildings and bridges, almost as much as he anticipated coming home to create his own buildings with the iconic toy bricks.

“Even when I went to high school, I was always saying that I wanted to be an architect,” says Novara, who took extra drafting classes when he was young.

This is evident in the dazzlingly colored, design-inspired artworks he produces. Taking a page as much from the pop-surrealists as he does from impressionism, Novara continues to construct worlds with his hands, albeit a world that is based around an existing real-world structure.

“I always start with a place, an object, a building, a monument, something that grounds the piece,” says Novara from his home and studio in Hillcrest. “And I go to all of them. So all the places you see in these pieces, I’ve been there and I’ve experienced it.”

He sketches and takes pictures of the places he visits — locations as varied as Zacatecas, Mexico and Berlin, Germany. He then begins to digitally manipulate the image, adds paints and patterns, improvising and evolving with different color treatments as the piece progresses.

“It’s the real world, but it’s altered,” says Novara, who cites author Haruki Murakami as one of his biggest influences. “It’s almost like a dream or a memory, something that is just slightly off. To show there is more than one side to the world.”

And just like the worlds of artists such as Zaha Hadid,S. H. Raza and Federico Babina , Novara’s acrylic-based paintings are rooted in that lifelong love of design and architecture.

This is evident in pieces such as “Among the Crowd, Berlin” and “Exhale, Palm Springs,” vibrantly colored pieces that combine geometric patterns and lines orbiting a building or a structure. The structure itself is manipulated in a way so as to give it almost illusory dimensions, as if the viewer is watching it unfold and unravel without losing its integrity. Almost abstract in nature, the result is something that feels like a blueprint of a building that, while existing in the real world, is being bent and reformed by our subconscious.

“It’s all grounded in my architecture training and how I looked at the world, which was through that lens of an architect; analyzing and breaking things down to lines and forms, and shapes and colors,” Novara says.

This approach really took shape while attending Syracuse University in upstate New York. While design and architecture had been a lifelong obsession, it was at Syracuse that Novara says he found that he preferred a much more analogue method of design, preferring to draw his designs and plans on mylar paper rather than using computer programs.

“I loved creating with my hands. I did all of my drafting with ink and pencil,” Novara recalls. “That is really the baseline to everything I do now.”

Just before graduation, and after spending months shoveling snow and slipping on ice during the frigid winters in Syracuse, Novara says a friend mentioned that he would be moving to San Diego. He jumped at the chance to go with him and has been here ever since. And while he’s worked at architecture and advertising firms, Novara says he would often feel uninspired after leaving the office. It wasn’t until 2019 that he left advertising to focus more on his creative projects while also working full-time as an administrator at the University of San Diego.

“It was that year when I really decided to try to make this a commitment for myself,” Novara recalls, adding that that COVID-19 pandemic, with its isolation and home confinement, also helped to further refine his work. “That was around the time that I really became serious about it. Thinking about how I get my art out there and sharing it beyond just this personal thing I like to do.”

Novara says he also saw a unique opportunity to use his art to help raise funds for organizations that were having to cancel fundraising events such as the San Diego LGBT Community Center in Hillcrest. He would commission and create pieces, and then would donate all the sales to the Center. He has since stuck with this philosophy that art should be used to “make a difference in the world,” most recently creating new work to help raise funds for refugee organizations like the International Rescue Committee.

“I used the pandemic as an opportunity to build experience while also making a difference in a way,” Novara says. “I was fortunate in that I had a job but I knew that there were other people and organizations who were struggling so I used that opportunity to move my work forward as well. It’s a cool way to give back and support the local community.”

He also used the time to create a series of intricately designed watercolor pieces consisting of stacked box shapes that are uniquely colored and, when taken all together, result in an almost hypnotic series of patterns.

“Those pieces take a long time, layer on top of layer,” says Novara, who wants to expand on the series, making them even bigger in scale. “So they just move along really slowly. It takes me a month just to finish one piece.”

Novara just wrapped a solo show at the L’Atelier Gallery space in Bankers Hill and is currently working on new pieces for the Superfine Art Fair in Los Angeles. He’s also working on newer city pieces that focus on his recent travels in places such as Vienna, Austria, and Shanghai, China. After participating in a group show at Visual Gallery in North Park, he’s also in talks to do a solo show at the space next year. And while San Diego provides plenty of inspiration (see his pieces that include structures like the North Park water tower), traveling is still his most reliable source of inspiration.

“From modernism to medieval architecture and the renaissance, when I travel I go to places that have these elements that I want to include in my work,” Novara says. “That’s what gets me really excited. That’s where the inspiration comes from and there’s just so much out there. It’s a never-ending well.”

Combs is a San Diego freelance writer.

Meet the Artist

Name: Tim Novara

Age: 42

Born: Wiesbaden, Germany

Fun Fact: Novara’s early work was more collage-based in nature. He’d often include pieces of vintage travel guides and maps within the works to give the work a sense of place.

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