Bob Timberlake's Letter to Home

Designed and published for
The Bob Timberlake Gallery
by Nathan W. Moehlmann, Goosepen Studio & Press

In celebration of Bob Timberlake's eightieth birthday and his five decades as one of the foremost realist painters in the United States, Bob Timberlake's Letter to Home is a sweeping conversation about one of the South's most distinguished artistic careers and a personal, intimate revelation of hope and dreams.

Co-written with noted natural history, sporting heritage, and Southern culture author T. Edward Nickens, Bob Timberlake's Letter to Home features more than fifty never-published works of art with dozens of pencil and watercolor studies that illustrate Timberlake's process. Essays and art recall the landscapes and people that have most inspired him, many in his native North Carolina, from Grandfather Mountain to Bald Head Island to the small, Davidson County farms in the Piedmont surrounding his hometown, Lexington, where his family has lived for generations.

Photographs and artifacts from his earliest days — boyhood sketches and paintings, collections of sporting art and memorabilia, including historical decoys and firearms — accompany Timberlake's stories, in his own words, of his decision to become an artist, of hunting and fishing and the love of the outdoors, of those who helped and encouraged him, and of an extended family of friends and loved ones who "brought him up" to realize early on "that it takes only three things," he writes, "to be truly happy: something to look forward to, something worthwhile to work hard towards, and someone to love."

Bob Timberlake's Letter to Home is quarterbound with a spine of Halflinnen and panels of Tintoretto, which resembles cold pressed watercolor paper. Of the 3,000 copies, 380 feature gilded edges of rose gold, along with a slipcase stamped in rose gold with the Bob Timberlake quill, a presiding symbol in Letter to Home.