Based in San Antonio, TX, Clif Tinker was born in Portsmouth,
Virginia (1956). He has lived in Texas, Colorado, Montana, and
California. Tinker is both a fine artist and a commercial artist. His
first professional work was as a paid daily cartoonist for the Daily
Cougar, the University of Houston student newspaper in 1985; he
continued as a cartoonist for the Paisano at the University of Texas at
San Antonio (UTSA) in 1988.
Tinker’s studio artworks are primarily Expressionist landscapes,
relief prints (woodblock and linocuts), etchings, mixed media collages,
and cartoon-style images. He has been represented by Artistic Endeavors
Gallery since 2004.
Clif Tinker graduated from Fullerton Union High School (FUHS) in
Fullerton, California in 1974. He has a BA in Psychology from the
University of Houston (1981), and, from UTSA, a BFA in Painting (1992)
and an MA in Art History (2001). His MA thesis is an analysis of the
sculptural program of the Aztec Theater in downtown San Antonio.
Tinker’s art teaching career started in 1986 at the San Antonio Art
Institute at the McNay Art Museum, where he taught the last seven years
that it was open. Tinker currently teaches art at James Madison High
School, where he is the Chair of Fine Arts.
In 1993 Tinker designed the nylon banners, known as “The
Transition Game”, for the Alamodome, then home of the San Antonio
Spurs. At just over 80,000 square feet, this is the largest cloth
sculpture in Texas. In 1998,Tinker’s design was the runner up in the
Fiesta poster contest. Dillard’s used this design as a Fiesta T-shirt,
and utilized two more T-shirt designs in subsequent years
.
Tinker designed the poster for the San Antonio Public Library
Centennial in 2003. It shows the Central Library, the Alamo, four
authors, and a desktop computer. Confetti images from within the poster
are repeated to form a border.
In 2004, Tinker designed a poster called “San Antonio Spurs, Then
and Now” to commemorate the team’s second championship. The Spurs
presented the poster to season-ticket holders. Also in 2004, the Texas
State Teacher’s Association (TSTA) used a Tinker painting for their
official 125th anniversary poster.
In 2010 the HEB Grocery Company commissioned Tinker to design a
reusable shopping bag with his painting, “San Antonio Montage.” They
printed 100,000 bags, which sold out in 5 months, their fastest selling
bag at that time. He made five more HEB bag designs, and 467,000 have
been sold. HEB commissioned Tinker to design various kitchen items as
well: coffee mugs, aprons, desert plates, serving trays, drink tumblers,
tortilla warmers, and cutting boards. These items have sold about
50,000 copies. The HEB products feature Tinker’s paintings of San
Antonio scenes, and cartoonish Southwestern imagery
.
Tinker has sold over 500 paintings in galleries, and he is in
private collections all across the United States and in Europe
(primarily Denmark and Norway). UTSA has eight Tinker paintings and
three Tinker posters in their permanent collection. In the 1990’s,
Chili’s commissioned 11 paintings to decorate their restaurants in San
Antonio. Tinker has numerous paintings decorating various restaurants
throughout San Antonio. The San Antonio Central Library has a painting
of the library in their collection, along with the original artwork for
the 100th Anniversary poster.
Tinker has illustrations in three books. He did a book cover for
a college Spanish text workbook, Apriendo paso a paso
(Wings Press, San Antonio, 2010), and A Heart Exchange: The
Story of Sister Joyce Bloom, FSPA (2010). In 2022 Tinker did 21
illustrations for Be Still and Know: Every Teacher Has A
Teaching. This is a yoga book by Lex Gillan and Peter Gillan about
Lex’s 50 years of teaching yoga.
Since 1989, Tinker has been in over 30 group art shows and over
20 one-person art shows, mainly in San Antonio. His one-person shows
include “Emergence,” a retrospective at the San Antonio Central Library
in 2005 and “View From the Top” at the Alamodome in 1998. He had 8
one-person exhibitions at Artistic Endeavors Gallery when it was located
in La Villita.
In 2010, Tinker was inducted onto the Fullerton Union High School
Wall of Fame. He won Best of Show Award in 2013 in the “Artists Who
Teach” exhibition, from the San Antonio Art Education Association. He is
treasurer and former president of the organization. Tinker received a
Friend of the San Antonio Library Arts and Letters award in 2018 for
“outstanding accomplishments in the arts and letters”.
