Timothy Allan Shafto, “In Motion”. PHOTO COURTESY THE ARTIST
“Living in Hawai‘i made me the artist I am today,” says Timothy Allan Shafto (timothyallanshafto.com). “I was always a maker and fabricator, but this place opened me up to endless inspiration and possibilities.” He started by making commercial metal door pulls in his home state of Colorado, then ran a stone fabrication business in San Francisco for a decade before moving to Hawai‘i Island in 2004. Here, he and his wife, Tiffany, fell in love with the endemic Hawaiian koa wood and soon began making furniture and resin-inlaid platters out of reclaimed pieces. Now, the artist has moved on to creating abstract, metallic paintings using wood and resin out of his studio in Hawi. “I often incorporate koa wood in my work because I feel it honors the incredible beauty of the wood and the story of the trees,” says Shafto. “The resin is engaging to work with because we like to say it’s 90% me and 10% chance—I’m never quite sure how it will finally settle despite all my efforts to create a composition.” The bold pieces are sometimes graphic and minimal, other times more free-flowing, but always hint at such natural-world inspirations as water, sky, and forest.
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