A Little About Me
It was the sixties! It was a real exciting time for the quiet, rural area where I was growing up, as well as everywhere else. My family lived a mile outside of Newtown, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Our house was built in an old apple orchard, that my great- grandfather had planted in the early 1900's. The orchard was surrounded by pastures and fields that seemed to stretch on forever.
My father was a school teacher, and my mother stayed home with me and my two younger brothers, Mark and John David, until we were much older. Before she was married, my mother worked for the government, and traveled overseas to many places, including Japan. A beautiful Japanese print of Mt. Fuji, that she brought back, was hanging in my bedroom. I would often just lie in my bed and look at it. Every Sunday, we went to Quaker Meeting, in Newtown. I spent a lot of time climbing trees and hiking along (and in) creeks.
But I was also becoming aware of the world outside of my nice-and-quiet surroundings. Very quickly, at an early age, I was noticing a lot of buzzing going on about things like the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War, The Beatles, the first Moon Landing, and lots of wild music and art. My parents sometimes had cool new music playing on the record player, and a lot of art books around the house. So, even though I was in this real provincial area, the multimedia in my house put me right into the thick of the sixties turbulence.
I did not understand a lot of what was going on, but I knew I wanted to be in on all the excitement.
In 1970, when I was ten, my father went to India. He came back and told me about all the different lifestyles he saw there; I was fascinated. I immediately became a vegetarian, and started to practice Yoga. I started to take formal lessons in painting and sculpture, with artists who lived in our town. This was the same year I met Emmet Gowin. The images of people and land in Emmet's photographs caused a major shift in the way I see things, and also made me focus more on what is beneath the surface of what I see and paint.
My rural surroundings, my family and their friends, and my Quaker commmunity were shaping the way I see the world, and setting the groundwork for my passions for art, peace, meditation, spirituality, and awe for the earth and the universe.
When I was a teenager, I knew I wanted to be an artist. I had the itch. In 1978, I graduated form George School. With full support and encouragement from my parents, I went to Rhode Island School of Design to study painting. In 1980, I moved to New York City to immerce myself in the artworld, and I continued my undergraduate studies at School of Visual Arts, where I got my BFA in 1982. I went on to get my MFA at
Brooklyn College, where I met my wife, Kathy, who is also a painter. I completed my Masters degree in 1985. I was making very big abstract paintings, in acrylic and mixed media, that were based on my ideas and memories of landscapes.
I started making digital paintings very recently -- over the past few months. It seems to be a natural progression for me. I am intrigued by the way the pixels (dots of light forming an image on the screen) can allude to the particles that make up matter, as decribed in physics. I come to my art to let myself lose my misperceptions of the universe, and to discover new stories. I also use art to meditate: to get a change of scenery, to get out of the "rat-race" for a while, and to stop, sit quietly, and listen to God.
I currently live in a small house on top of a mountain, with my wife, Kathy and my son Luke, who is almost six, in Pocono Summit, Pennsylvania. Living in the middle of the Pocono Mountains is not too remote, but remote enough to have some quiet and calm. We are members of North Branch Friends Meeting. I try to balance having a family life, a demanding job, and still be able to make art. The computer had helped me do this. A computer takes up much less space than the big canvases I used to work on. And it is far easier to "click save", than to clean up an assortment of art materials (or leave things set up, and risk disaster) when life demands moving on to something else at a moment's notice.
I teach art at Wordsworth at Shawnee, which is a children's residential treatment program and school. I am beginning to introduce digital art to the kids there. It is proving to be a very effective teaching tool.
I am very excited about the places my art is going with digital tools. I continue to feel the urge to create images that are meditative, point to peace, and that reveal what I see is magnificant around me, right here in this world, right now. This is an urge I have felt most of my life.
Tim Mammel
Pocono Summit, PA
September 20, 1997