An untitled painting from Tim Daly’s “My Salad Days” exhibition at 503 Social Club in Hoboken.
Like most good landscape painters, Tim Daly is an accidental historian. The Hoboken-based artist didn’t set out to tell the story of Hudson County as it has morphed from a muddy metropolitan annex to something as hard and shimmering as a diamond bracelet. In the 1980s, the young Daly had no way to know how much his Mile Square City would change. Change it has, and during every plot development, Daly has been there with his paintbrush.
An untitled painting from “My Salad Days.”
He has earned the right to contribute to his town’s complicated tale, even if he never quite set out to be a chronicler.
Daly is best known for his work in acrylic: grand, meticulous renderings of familiar streetscapes, rail bridges, highways through the swamps, and contrails and stratus clouds over the Meadowlands. Until they are examined, these pieces look like blown-up snapshots. Upon inspection, the curious weight and substance of Daly’s light and the slight but unmissable sci-fi weirdness of his vision lets the viewer know that these are no photographs.
Before he refined the bright, clear-lined, crisp style that Hudson County knows him by, he composed street scenes in soft, melting pastel and smoky charcoal. It is this early work that currently hangs in his “My Salad Days” show at 503 Social in Hoboken. This is an emotional, autobiographical show from a longtime Hudson County resident, empathetic urbanist, and honest observer on the Observer Highway.
If Daly’s mature streetscapes feel eerily depopulated, his early pastels are anything but. These “Salad Days” images are smudged, streaked and tagged by human hands, and touched by human lives.
An untitled painting from “My Salad Days.”
Sometimes we see the people themselves, engaged in everyday dramatic acts. One of these characters lurks in the gloomy margin of a haunting pastel and charcoal image of a building covered in crude graffiti. He is visible in the half-light that shines through the thin glass rectangle in the middle of a tenement door, and looks over his shoulder like there is something after him. His furtive demeanor couldn’t be more different from the cheery, bipedal bear scrawled in outline on a filthy wall. The animal’s body is scored by lines and streaks, and the four pan-like objects at his left make him look like he has delivering pizzas.
The frivolity of the cartoon bear amplifies his anxiety. He has been crowded out of his own scene by the crude residue of human activity.
It fit the mood of the town at the time. In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Hoboken was reeling. Hundreds of unexplained fires drove poor residents, many Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican and Guyanese families, from their homes. More than 50 people died, and many others were forced to relocate.
Were the fires the work of arsonists hired by unscrupulous real estate developers who had recognized the Mile Square as a good, cheap long-term bet? No one has ever been prosecuted, but Hobokenites certainly have their suspicions.
An untitled painting from “My Salad Days.”
“The Fires: Hoboken 1978-1982,” a provocative exhibit presented at The Hoboken Historical Museum in 2023, chronicled the period exhaustively, and stopped just short of an outright accusation. “My Salad Days” often feels like a counterpart to that show — an expression of compassion for a town that was, sometimes literally, under a cloud. While there are no representations of flames in Daly’s pieces, the charcoal he applies to the paper looks an awful lot like ash. Flames were always flickering in the back of his mind.
Sometimes he makes us feel the steam. In one charcoal piece, a young man sitting sideways on a chair blows out smoke in a horizontal burst. His exhalation melds with a large white tangle of lines on a gray wall and appears to become one with it. Did his mouth contain arrows, serpentine curves, the skeleton of a bare tree blooming from a rickety indoor table? His companion, an older woman with thick glasses, a headband and an exhausted demeanor, seems oblivious to it. Another man in the foreground hunches his shoulders protectively; he, too, doesn’t see the design scraped into the wall, but he appears aware of it.
Daly’s talent for expression is on view all over “My Salad Days,” even when the faces of his subjects are smothered by shadow. Their nonchalance is an obvious pose. The prevailing feeling in this room is one of pressure, siege and energies barely contained and ready to burst.
An untitled painting from “My Salad Days.”
When he takes us outdoors, we see the beginnings of his lifetime obsession with the open sky. Daly’s firmament has always been vast and unsearchable territory, a busy place full of mystery, color, rhythm and odd visual phenomena. It is not, however, ever completely separated from the land. Often it feels like a commentary on (or a compensation for) the city it hovers above.
In one beautiful rooftop image, cirrus clouds seem to be streaming from a series of pyramid skylights. The building isn’t on fire, but the peach-orange sunset certainly connotes irresistible heat. In another, thick cotton balls overhead soften the space between the edges of two brick buildings. Even as we live our lives on the hard concrete, there is something soft and pillowy to aspire to, just beyond our reach, but well worth dreaming about.
But Daly is and will always be best at capturing the strange moods that buildings — especially old buildings — conjure, and in the ‘80s, his long conversation with the steel and cement was already well underway. Though the colors in “Salad Days” are subtle, they are unmistakably post-industrial: faded brick red-browns, the lizard-green of ivy on windowless walls, and the faded blue of toll booths and drawbridge operator shacks. He has a knack for suggesting water damage with a few squiggly strokes, and can summon the distressed surfaces of worn-down sidewalks and bent, brittle chain link.
The main character of one of the best “Salad Days” pieces is a watchdog so deeply embedded in the scrub vegetation of a chained-up yard that he could have been placed there by the landscape architect. He is such a part of the building that it is possible to miss him, as he stares at you with big, lonesome eyes.
An untitled painting from “My Salad Days.”
None of these pieces have the near-clinical precision of Daly’s acrylics. In 1982, he may not have developed that ability. In retrospect, that was for the best: Hoboken in the 1980s was not a place of clean lines and sharp corners. That would come, and by the time it did, Daly’s style evolved with it. The pastel and charcoal textures of the “Salad Days” pieces suit the miasmal feel of the lost Hudson County, as it was.
In the most intriguing of the black-and-white pieces, a man in a baseball cap places four delicate dolls on the hood of a beater. There is little else on the block besides a shabby tenement, a leaning fence and a cargo truck. It is a study in incongruity: The toys are feminine, exotic and elegantly dressed, and the street is rough, desolate, utterly removed from glamor. There is a center, and it isn’t going to hold.
It is unclear what the heck the man is up to, or where he or anybody else in Hoboken are headed. Nevertheless, they are on the move.
The opening reception for Tim Daly’s “My Salad Days” at 503 Social Club in Hoboken will be on Sept. 20, at 5 p.m. Visit facebook.com/503socialclub.
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