‘The Painters’ Hands’: Timothy Curtis celebrates graffiti and Pennsylvania Dutch traditions

Six faces, each a white moon-like circle, each one with a distinctive gentle expression composed with a few lines of dark blue paint, seem to float at the center of a profusion of abstracted elongated tulips. The deep blue tulips and lines of foliage burst upward with the energy of a fountain in Timothy Curtis’ painting “They Didn’t Realize We Were Seeds.” Expressive and relatable faces and long stemmed tulips populate this new body of Curtis’ work — paintings with threads of influence from unexpectedly connected artistic traditions of his home city of Philadelphia, 19th-century salt-glazed stoneware and 1960s-’90s graffiti.