I currently live and work in the Inwood section of Manhattan. I received my MFA from Queens College in 1998, and am the recipient of several awards and grants. I regularly show my paintings around New York. Most recently I was awarded a grant to build a wheel-able sidewalk gallery and walk it through various neighborhoods in New York City.

My paintings are labor intensive. I work on many of them for over a year, and usually keep two or three going at once. I'll often let them sit for several months once I’ve locked in the final form, coming back sometimes much later to clean up the surface and finish up any quirks that’ve been bugging me.

To me, the paintings feel toylike, I get glimpses of them in my mind’s eye and it seems like they are to be played with. My own childhood experiences with toys were bittersweet but I loved the forms, shapes, holding them in my hand, the weight of the thing, its heft and of course the colors.

I remember I had a small farm set, with tractors, a wagon, disc harrow, hay baler — the miniaturized scale allowed the textures and spatial juxtapositions to skew a bit and seemed to alter the depth of field; like Tilt-Shift photos, a surreal play-space to escape into.

When I opened the box of a new model truck or ship or airplane and examined the stamped-out parts, each varying from the other, yet all interconnected via the grid-like support sprue, it awakened in me a sense of order. Everything had a place, a purpose.

From the flashy box cover to the pristinely formed shapes inside, there was so much promise. Much more than could be delivered. Toys of course could be raced outside immediately upon opening the package, though they lost some of their appeal once opened, the illusion breaking down. The models required assembly, paint, glue; with them most of my time was spent in extreme frustration as I clumsily introduced any number of flaws and imperfections to the cleanly fabricated parts.

Agitation; the result of a dreamed-up fantasy conflicting with observed reality, or the seductive call to interfere with a perceived perfection, immediately followed by the despair of having taken the wrong action in an effort to elaborate on (and inevitably diminish) that perfection is how my paintings get going.

While I'm invariably compelled by what I'll assume is a solidly ordered aesthetic, I often find myself tangentially introducing any number of awkward, unanticipated elements to reconcile moods and impulses before pulling back desperately toward a more concise expression.

I spend weeks interpreting these newly created forms, tying them into past impulses, correlating them with prior paintings, categorizing them, taking pictures of them, viewing them on the computer (where the scale shift can help clarify and reveal blind spots; edits can be mapped out digitally too and incorporated later).

If you'd like a more complete biography and an accompanying CV, or to arrange a visit at my upper Manhattan studio, please email me at info@timothymutzel.com.

Timothy Mutzel
info@timothymutzel.com
105 Arden Street, Apt. 2E
New York, NY 10040