Tim Tozer, Artist

Hello and welcome to the 57th 3 Art Questions With Jackson interview! This time I interviewed the talented painter Tim Tozer. I met him years ago at Rosalux Gallery and I liked him and his paintings. His paintings are amazing! I have wanted to interview Tim for a long time and I am glad that it has happened now. I enjoyed what he had to say and I think that you will too! Thank you for reading! (Instagram: @tim.tozer / All images courtesy of the artist)

Jackson: How did you become an artist? Were you around art or did you have a specific experience? 

Tim: I was lucky to grow up in a household where art in most forms was always present - music, literature, painting, etc. My dad was an architect and my mum was an art teacher; I think I draw more like my dad, but my mum took me to London to see the exhibitions that would inspire me to become a painter. There was a Lucian Freud retrospective in 1984 that was particularly important to me; I remember looking at a painted knee and thinking that yes, this was what I wanted to do!

Jackson: Do you think being from England has informed your paintings? Do you ever feel nostalgic?

Tim: I've been in the US for over half my life now, but I still think of myself as a British painter. I'm skeptical of that kind of sentimentality, but yes, I think a lot of my figurative work has been a way to relive a sort of unfixed version of my past. My more overtly abstract work has been my attempt to strip away the nostalgia and exist in the present, although of course everything shares the same formal DNA. I do miss England all the time, however, and I can't separate that from what I do.

Jackson: If you could meet any artist living or dead, who would it be and why?

Tim: This is a really difficult question! I'm afraid that if I met an artist I admire, something in their personality might taint the work for me forever - not necessarily in a negative way, just in a way that limits it. However, it would be fun to sit in a corner and watch Vermeer paint; I wouldn't want to chat (I don't speak Dutch anyway), just to see how a human made those paintings. I'd like to shake Julie Mehretu's hand to salute their epic accomplishment; that retrospective at the Walker was one for the ages. And having a drink with Francis Bacon would've been something to brag about, even if you couldn't remember much of it afterwards.