Timothy Ely
Timothy C. Ely is a contemporary American painter, graphic artist, and bookbinder, known for creating single-copy handmade books as art objects.
Ely was born in Snohomish, Washington in 1949. Following graduate school, Ely undertook a self-directed study of bookbinding and began to create his first work..
Much of Ely’s work is annotated with his own glyphs he calls “cribriform.”
With a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Ely traveled to Japan, Italy, and England to study bookbinding and paper making. He then moved to New York where he established a studio and taught at the Center for Book Arts. From New York, he moved his studio to Portland, Oregon, back to his native Pacific Northwest. His work is in many private and public collections, including the Library of Congress, the Brooklyn Museum, the Boston Athenaeum, the Getty Research Institute, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Lilly Library.
Ely has also collaborated with the writers David Abel and Terence McKenna, who also wrote the introduction to the 1995 trade publication of Ely's 1985 book Flight Into Egypt. Ely has also illustrated a small number of conventional or commercial projects.
Some of Ely's works includes: Heliotropy, Countercode Archeo-logic, Triad, Optical Aleutians 4, Elementals, Totem, Sense 9, Doppler Gossip, Alpha Deep, Saturnia, Arka, Pelidnota, Gamma Cruxis, Tables of Mercury, Time Stunt: Spore, Compound 12, Halo Chalice, Trajections, Formation, Index, Interference, Polarity.
Ely currently lives in Colfax, Washington.
