Episode 173 | Tim Pauszek

Published January 17, 2023

Transcript

Miranda Metcalf  00:00

Okay, how you feeling?

Timothy Pauszek  00:01

Very nervous.

Miranda Metcalf  00:03

You know I'm your wife, right?

Timothy Pauszek  00:04

I - it's why I'm nervous!

Miranda Metcalf  00:21

Hello, print friends, and welcome. I'm your host, Miranda Metcalf. This is a bilingual podcast, so if you subscribe to us, you'll be getting episodes in English with me, as well as in Spanish with Reinaldo Gil Zambrano. Together, we speak to people around the globe about their practice and passions in the field of print media and multiples. Hello, Print Friend is brought to you by Speedball Art Products. In 1915, Ross F. George published the first edition of the Speedball Textbook, which quickly became the superlative resource for artists and letterers of all ages and skill levels. This is a great resource for the gig poster gang or folks who just want to develop their fonts and letterforms for screenprinting and relief. In celebration of the 105th year anniversary of the edition's first debut, the 25th edition of the Speedball textbook has a convenient lay flat construction and 120 pages of examples, contributors' works, and innovative technical insight that is sure to inspire and appeal to scribes and enthusiasts across the spectrum of experience. There's a link in the show notes. This episode is also brought to you by Legion Paper. Legion Paper is a fine art paper company representing the best papers in the world. They either stock it, source it, or make it. With brands like Stonehenge, Somerset, Coventry, Reeves, Arches, and more, Legion is the best paper resource for artists and printmakers everywhere. Learn more about the variety of papers Legion stocks at www.legionpaper.com. My guest this week is Tim Pauszek, an artist and printmaker who will be featured in Print Austin's Five by Five exhibition. He's also my husband. We talk about his experience growing up in a factory town on Lake Erie and the way it's changed within just one generation, going to graduate school at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, how and why we value different kinds of labor, and why he's making work about home. So without further ado, sit back, relax, and prepare to punch that clock with Tim Pauszek. Hi, Tim. How's it going?

Timothy Pauszek  02:35

Hello, Miranda Metcalf! I've been thinking about that for weeks, how I was going to do this intro.

Miranda Metcalf  02:49

No, it's fitting. It's fitting. It's what you used to text me every morning.

Timothy Pauszek  02:52

That's very true.

Miranda Metcalf  02:54

Mm-hmm, yeah.

Timothy Pauszek  02:56

And the rest of it, I can't say on here.

Miranda Metcalf  02:58

No, no, you can't. You can't say those texts. So I feel like this is a moment that the Pine Copper Lime/Hello, Print Friend/Me empire has been leading up to for like three years.

Timothy Pauszek  03:20

Yeah. At least, Ben's been waiting for it.

Miranda Metcalf  03:22

Yeah.

Timothy Pauszek  03:23

One fan out there. This is for you, Ben.

Miranda Metcalf  03:27

And so it's the interview in which I interview my husband, the printmaker, Timothy Pauszek.

Timothy Pauszek  03:37

And you're all about to find out why I'm the editor, and Miranda is the host.

Miranda Metcalf  03:45

And the reason it came about, really, is because you're in the Print Austin Five by Five exhibition, and so every year, this podcast and a couple others partners with Print Austin - and now print Santa Fe, the inaugural year - to talk to some of the Five by Five awardees, people who were juried into the show. And this year, you were among them. And so welcome to the podcast, Tim.

Timothy Pauszek  04:13

Thank you. You know what's weird, is that the judges I tried to bribe in Santa Fe rejected me, and the ones in Austin who I don't even know accepted my work. So you can't even say that this is like, nepotism...

Miranda Metcalf  04:25

Nepo baby, yeah.

Timothy Pauszek  04:26

It's fair and square.

Miranda Metcalf  04:29

Yeah, no, no, nepo baby is trending right now. So it's a good thing. Yeah. Well... so I've prepared some questions for you.

Timothy Pauszek  04:42

Thank God, because I don't know how we're gonna do this otherwise!

Miranda Metcalf  04:45

I know. And so, for the listeners out there who do not know you, Tim, would you please let them know who you are, where you are, what you do?

Timothy Pauszek  05:01

My name is Tim Pauszek. And I am a printmaker and a sound editor for a podcast that I don't listen to. And I live in Santa Fe at the moment, but because I'm married to you, I don't know how long that will last. We'll probably move somewhere. But for the moment, I'm in Santa Fe. And I think that's all the questions that you asked.

Miranda Metcalf  05:32

Yep, yeah. And where did you grow up? And what role did art play in that part of your life?

Timothy Pauszek  05:38

Yeah. So I grew up in Dunkirk, New York, which is near Buffalo, couple snow drifts away. And art is a weird thing in my... I mean, I don't know. It's weird, but like, I definitely didn't go to museums or anything like that. But both of my brothers would draw a lot. There was a lot of, like, copying Mortal Kombat characters. And my dad was also really good at drawing, and he would copy cartoon characters, like he loves the - so my dad, for anyone who doesn't know him, is nearly six foot tall, used to be able to bench like 300 pounds, like, he's a big guy. And he loves Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. So like, that's what he would draw and paint. So I just kind of grew up watching them draw and paint for fun. And you know, I was the annoying little brother who just looked over their shoulder and wanted to watch it happen. And I would draw my own stuff, but I would always get so frustrated drawing that I'd just rather watch them, weirdly enough.

Miranda Metcalf  06:51

Well, but at some point, you must have taken up your own drawing or your own practice, even as a young child? When did that happen?

Timothy Pauszek  07:00

Yeah. When did it happen? I don't even know, really. But yeah, I think I was just talking with my friend and business partner, Josh, here in Santa Fe, and we were talking about drawing Dragon Ball Z characters, and like I said, Mortal Kombat characters. My brothers and I, we had these... kind of like the guidebooks for video games, so we'd draw a lot of that. And then my cousins and I, we used to make these trading cards. There was this cartoon called Pelswick. Yeah, it was like... the main character was like, in a wheelchair, and he had these two friends. And I don't even remember the show at all. But there was one episode where they were playing this card game. And me and my cousins would actually, like, we cleaned out my closet. And we turned my closet into a card shop where we made these cards. And the game had no rules, but it was like, basically, we were doing Yu-Gi-Oh! before Yu-Gi-Oh! was a thing. And so I guess -

Miranda Metcalf  07:57

But with cards you made?

Timothy Pauszek  07:58

Yeah, that we made. So I guess that would be some of the first things, was like, drawing out of these video game guidebooks, and then making our own trading cards, playing cards, like Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, that kind of stuff, is when I started drawing. I guess, really, if you think about it. And then from there, it just kind of... you know, we've had a couple of guests who say this, like, 'Yeah, I was the kid in art class who did it the most,' right, because I did it at home with my friends and my cousins and my brothers. And so I was the kid who was like, oh, you're the art kid in school. Because I just kept drawing. So it just kind of happened.

Miranda Metcalf  08:34

Yeah. I sometimes wonder how much of our identities, particularly when we're that age, get formed by how much people just reflect us back to ourselves. Like, was I the weird kid because I was told I was the weird kid? And then I was like, 'Well, I'm gonna lean into this.'

Timothy Pauszek  08:52

Right.

Miranda Metcalf  08:53

You know, here comes the pink hair.

Timothy Pauszek  08:55

Yeah, well, it's interesting. I had a seventh grade teacher who really taught us how to start drawing. It was weird. Like, we would do perspective, and... it was the most in-depth art class I can remember. We had a sketchbook with assignments, and that was kind of cool. And then my eighth grade teacher, who I think was actually a proper artist, a painter, [was] totally fucking nuts. And I did not want to do art in high school because of her. I did eventually, and I'm glad I did. But yeah, so it's... I don't know, I guess, in a way, you lean in. I don't know. I just kept doing it.

Miranda Metcalf  09:35

Yeah. I feel like I've got a little bit, just slightly more, familiarity with your practice than other guests who've been on.

Timothy Pauszek  09:45

Fair enough.

Miranda Metcalf  09:46

So I want to encourage you to maybe talk a little bit more about your hometown, just because I feel like it'll sort of set the scene for your later work. So that was your home life. That's your older brothers, your cousins, your dad, but tell us about Dunkirk.

Timothy Pauszek  10:01

Yeah. Okay, Dunkirk's strange, but also, like, normal. I don't know, it's normal because I grew up there. So it's right on Lake Erie. It was a big factory town, steel town. Brooks Locomotive was there. So they built trains at one point, did steel, my grandfathers were train workers and steel workers. There was a pier for shipping, there was a coal fired power plant. And like, I don't really know exactly the history, and who knows how much is fact versus fiction. Because that's a big part of growing up there, is a lot of nicknames and teasing and storytelling. Tall tales, yeah. And so... I mean, we'll probably get into some of those stories later. But it used to be a booming industrial town, and then everything moved to Buffalo. And then everything moved south. So it's now the area called the Rust Belt, you know, that old steel town. And it's weird, it used to be, I would hear these stories that if you didn't like the job you were at, you could quit, and by lunchtime, just walk down the street and have another job. Now it's kind of like - and this was probably the same way then - but now that's kind of gone, but you can walk one block after one block, and if you only have one drink at every bar you hit, you're gonna be fucked up in a couple of blocks.

Miranda Metcalf  10:41

Tall tales. By lunchtime.

Timothy Pauszek  11:15

Yeah, by lunchtime. Probably before breakfast, actually, if you're working third shift. There's a couple of bars that are open - and that's an interesting thing, too - Erie County, anyway, not Chautauqua County, which is where Dunkirk is, but Erie County, where Buffalo is, bars are open 'til 4am. And that's a holdout from that Rust Belt, steel factory era where guys getting out of second shift could stay out later and get drinks. But there's still bars that are open, like the Vet's Club that I used to go to, that my grandfather founded after World War Two with some of his friends, they're open really early. Like, you can go get a drink at like nine, ten in the morning. Because you're getting out of work on your third shift. And so you can go get a drink at nine o'clock in the morning. So it's this weird hardworking, joke telling, teasing, loving, but also definitely not politically correct, alcohol-fueled weirdness of all sorts of shit going on. Yeah.

Miranda Metcalf  12:38

Yeah. Could you tell the story - and I hope I get this the setup right.

Timothy Pauszek  12:45

Okay.

Miranda Metcalf  12:45

But the story of, is it your grandfather, in the train?

Timothy Pauszek  12:49

Yeah, so my grandfather - like I mentioned, Brooks Locomotive, they used to build locomotive engines there. And when my grandfather was in the army, he was in the Korean War. And he was... I forget where, it was somewhere they were traveling out west, getting ready to be shipped out or whatever. And one of the privates in his troop or something like that, looks at my grandpa, and he's like, 'Oh, where are you from, Bob? You know, probably some hick town I never heard of.' And my grandpa's like, yeah, okay, whatever. He just kind of keeps his mouth shut - which is weird for my grandpa Bob, because he's more of a hothead, which is probably where I get it from. And anyway, they get further out west, and they're going up a mountain pass or something. Anyway, they got to change the engine on this train. They got to switch it out so that they can get over these mountains. And on the side of the locomotive, it says, 'Manufactured in Dunkirk, New York.' And my grandfather looks at the guy and says, 'That's where I'm from.' So that's kind of the train story.

Miranda Metcalf  13:51

Yeah, yeah. Cuz it was like, the more powerful train.

Timothy Pauszek  13:54

Yeah, exactly.

Miranda Metcalf  13:57

Yeah, I just feel like that story always makes me a little bit emotional to hear. And I think there's just a lot in there, not the least of which is... a time and a place in our country where manufacturing was a source of pride. Not only for the towns, but of course, for the people in the towns. That someone could be proud of what they made, or what they were part of making, or what part of their people made. And that there's just a kind of honor in that, and knowing that the gutting of that industry, and the real economic blight that followed it - just sort of knowing all the trickle down effects that's had to the core of our country, to our country's values - and for me, it's all summed up in that one story, from two young boys heading out to the Korean War.

Timothy Pauszek  15:06

Yeah, totally. And, you know, like you said, it carries through those areas where it used to have this sense of pride. And now it... I was at a - music was a big part of growing up for me - and I was at a Dead Heart show in Buffalo. And the guitar player or the bass player, one of them, said something about Buffalo, which was like, 'We love being from here, but we hate being here.' And I think that kind of is the more recent truth of that, is like, certain things have been lost. And you love this thing you call home, this place you call home. But you also realize that in a lot of instances, you've got to move away. And if you don't, you kind of can get stuck, in a weird way.

Miranda Metcalf  15:52

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I feel like we could fill up the rest of the entire podcast talking about the decline of American manufacturing and the economic and social consequences, because I know it's something that's deep in your work, but I think we'll probably circle back to it. But I want to make sure that we now get a chance to talk about how you came to printmaking.

Timothy Pauszek  16:17

I took art classes in high school, and I think it was junior year, like the end of my junior year, I got the chance to make... prints in high school. And the way that came about was, M.C. Escher was my favorite artist, right? And I was looking at my teacher, and I was like, 'Well, M.C. Escher does drawing and painting. I'm gonna be doing drawing and painting.' And my teacher, who had an MFA in print, I think, or was working towards one, he was like, 'Well, no, he does prints. He's a graphic artist. He does printmaking.' And I was like, 'Okay, well, so do I. I'm a printmaker. What's printmaking?' And then that's when he showed me. And I made my first drypoint etching on plexiglass, and a linocut. And it was fucking awful. The lino was, I don't know, probably like a century old, and brittle, and was just miserable to carve.

Miranda Metcalf  17:25

You had the dullest tools, probably?

Timothy Pauszek  17:27

Well, the tools were super dull. They were the Speedball linocut tools, and -

Miranda Metcalf  17:32

Speedball's our sponsor, so -

Timothy Pauszek  17:34

Yeah, no, nothing against the tools. They were just really old. I'm just telling you. But so then they switched me to wood for woodcut. And so I was using fucking pine, which is why I told you it should never be Pine Copper Lime, because carving pine sucks. Not even pine plywood, just planks of pine, with Speedball linocut tools. And I was miserable. But I also loved it. It was the best... it just felt right. It was like, 'Yeah, okay, I'm doing this.' And all my prints are terrible. And I still have them, and I show them whenever I teach. And I'll show my woodcuts from after undergrad versus my first ones when I started.

Miranda Metcalf  18:16

Why do you think that was? Why do you think it kind of lit you up in a way that, it sounds like, drawing and painting hitherto hadn't?

Timothy Pauszek  18:25

I guess in a way, I don't know. Maybe I liked making things? Because of what you were saying, of this lost identity in manufacturing and pride in that, I wanted to put that back on my 16-year-old self - I'm sure that's bullshit. I just liked it. I think I just liked it.

Miranda Metcalf  18:46

Yeah. I mean, I, too, was thinking about maybe - artificially or not - drawing a line between your lineage of people who make things with their hands - that is a little bit arduous, and a little bit precise, and a little bit needing some elbow grease - and printmaking.

Timothy Pauszek  19:11

Yeah, well, there's - and I'm not sure where your questions are going, but there's a little bit more of a connection with my family lineage and printmaking that I'm sure we'll get to later. Yeah, I don't know, I really think a lot of it was like, 'Escher did it? I'm gonna do it.' I really do think it was probably mostly that. The labor that goes into printmaking is what has come out of the practice since. I think it was probably like, I just loved Escher. I wanted to make this stuff. I totally ripped off a bunch of his pieces when I was in high school.

Miranda Metcalf  19:45

Yeah, like you do.

Timothy Pauszek  19:46

As you should. And then it kind of came into the labor thing as I went on through college and graduate school.

Miranda Metcalf  19:56

So when did you start making work about home and family and where you're from?

Timothy Pauszek  20:04

I think I started making work about home my junior year of college. I think. Because, I mean, every once in a while, I would probably dabble a little bit with religious themes. And I grew up Roman Catholic, so like, in a way that's home, but not... the work I was making was more of a critique of that, just being a pissed off Roman Catholic kid.

Miranda Metcalf  20:31

I was gonna say, I feel like every undergrad artist with a religious background needs to have their sacrilegious period.

Timothy Pauszek  20:41

Exactly, exactly.

Miranda Metcalf  20:42

Just got to get it out of their system. Oh, really?

Timothy Pauszek  20:43

Yeah, so I wouldn't really count that as making work about home. My junior year, though, I took Intro to Printmaking and Intro to Glassblowing. And I think they might have been the same semester, I don't really remember. But I definitely... in Intro to Printmaking, I was making work about sailor tattoos, or tattoos, and kind of stuff like that. And thinking about maybe the water, and growing up on Great Lake Erie. So started kind of getting it that way. And another set of prints I made in that semester was about my mom passing away, which was a remake of some prints that I made in high school. So I guess in a way, but that's not necessarily home. That's my mom and family history. So it's kind of starting [then]. And so I guess the first piece that I can remember really being about this industrial, post-industrial home was this piece I made for my Intro to Glass class, we had to make a talisman. And write a... like a screenplay to go along with it, or something like that. And I didn't really write a screenplay, I wrote more of a poem to explain what it was. And the talisman was a little glass cube with some rope wrapped around it. And its magical power was to bring industry back.  So the poem was - the one line that I remember really liking - because I used to do this down by the lake, there's a street called Lakeshore Boulevard. And you can walk down at night, because there's no cars down there. Like, it's pretty empty, particularly past curfew and all that stuff, just no one's down there. And so the one line I remember from this poem was, 'He walks down double yellow lines like a cowboy in a ghost town.' And I just remember that from walking around the streets at night in Dunkirk. It's not a bustling town, so there's nothing going on. So you can walk down the street and you're going to be fine. And so it was like, yeah, all about bringing industry back and wanting this place that I had called home to be able to support me post-college. Because I'd see my brothers go away. And there's no coming back, right? Like, my oldest brother's a PhD chemist. There's nothing for him to do in Dunkirk. So yeah, I would say it started with that piece, probably.

Miranda Metcalf  23:12

And then from there, at some point, it must have expanded into your senior thesis project. Which was really all about stories from home.

Timothy Pauszek  23:26

Yeah, so I don't even know how that really happened. I had just gotten back from Christmas break, and I was at the coffee shop. And I was in my sketchbook, and I just remembered my grandfather - same one with the locomotive story - this story about him playing this drinking game. And I just sketched out this glass of beer with two raw eggs in it, which is like the punchline of the story. And, you know, I just made this one drawing, and I was like, 'This is pretty cool.' And then we're in our class, and we're talking about what we're going to do, and blah, blah, blah. And I was really, at this point, already starting to have the imposter syndrome... which is like, I want my work to really do something. Like, be a really big statement. I was, I think at the time, freaking out that I wasn't gonna change the world or do shit like Ai Weiwei, or whatever. And I was like, oh my god, what's the fucking point of making work if my work's not going to do that? And I showed this drawing to my professor Laurel Carpenter, who's awesome, and she - I forget exactly what she said, but she said something to the effect of, 'These stories... making work about this place... this can change the world.' And that kind of stuck with me, and I was like, 'Okay!' Like, I'll just make... it was kind of someone saying, 'You're allowed to make this.' And that I didn't have to... I don't know, completely rebel against the oppressive forces of blah, blah, blah, whatever. Like, I was allowed to make people happy. To laugh. And I think that was part of her advice, was like, 'You're putting good stuff in the world. That's good. You're allowed to do that.'

Miranda Metcalf  25:23

I'm guessing that you're probably not alone in being a young artist who comes in kind of with that drive, of 'I need to be Ai Weiwei,' you know? And that part of, I think, learning about art and why people connect to it, at least for me, and I think the way I connect to it, is the beauty in something being so specific. Like it doesn't, in a way, it almost doesn't matter what the art is, as long as it's the essence of the thingness that it's going for.

Timothy Pauszek  26:01

Yeah.

Miranda Metcalf  26:02

And sitting in our home, looking around at the art collection that we have, which is very eclectic, is kind of making me think about that. Like, we have a Mike Pennekamp I can see behind you.

Timothy Pauszek  26:15

Yep.

Miranda Metcalf  26:16

And it's of a UFO. But the entire energy of it is so very much UFO-ness. It is UFO-issimo.

Timothy Pauszek  26:26

Yeah.

Miranda Metcalf  26:27

And it's very specific. It's telling a specific story. And so I think maybe learning that - that art can be that expansive - is maybe a really important lesson for young artists.

Timothy Pauszek  26:47

Yeah. And I don't know, now that you're talking about that, we've also got Nathan Meltz's robot rabbits, "Watership Down," here. And that print... you saw it and loved it, and we got it and we framed it, and we hang it up, and it makes us happy. It brightens our day. That does so much more - seeing you happy looking at that print does so much more to better my life than Ai Weiwei giving the finger to, what is it, the Forbidden City, I believe? That photo that he took. Anyway, the point is, Nathan could have argued while he was making those rabbits, 'Oh, this isn't going to be Ai Weiwei.' But truly, that piece has affected my life more dramatically than some of the quote-unquote "great" pieces of art. Again, I don't know if you've got questions leading to that, but that thing, like, what affects artists more than the quote-unquote "great" pieces out there, also plays a pretty big role in my thinking about art.

Miranda Metcalf  27:57

Yeah, yeah. So you go to Alfred University for your undergrad, and you do chemistry and fine arts, and you have this show where you have all of these prints and their different stories and different jokes, even, just from your family. And you're selling them all twenty dollar, no holler.

Timothy Pauszek  28:19

Thank you, Martin Mazzoura.

Miranda Metcalf  28:20

Thank you, Martin Mazzoura. And then you graduate, you go to work in a factory for a bit, and kind of discover how difficult that really is.

Timothy Pauszek  28:33

I lasted six months and threw in the towel. I was a professional prune juice taster. Not really, I did more than that, but it was... it's grueling. Yeah, I couldn't hack it.

Miranda Metcalf  28:46

And you end up going back to Alfred, and you're a tech there. And then you meet a visiting scholar and you guys get married?

Timothy Pauszek  28:59

Yeah, I had questions. And you? You had answers. And I wanted them.

Miranda Metcalf  29:05

Yeah. And some other things.

Timothy Pauszek  29:09

"Answers."

Miranda Metcalf  29:10

"Answers." But at this time, we're dating and engaged and married. You're applying to graduate school. And, you know, despite the fact that your work is very much placed in Western New York, we end up going to the University of New South Wales.

Timothy Pauszek  29:29

Yeah, a little further away.

Miranda Metcalf  29:32

A little further away, in Sydney. And so you and I, in our greatest act of hubris to date, hopefully never to be matched again -

Timothy Pauszek  29:44

Yeah, hopefully, that one is the pinnacle and we don't try and outdo that one.

Miranda Metcalf  29:49

Yeah.

Timothy Pauszek  29:49

I ain't gonna make it out alive if we try and top it.

Miranda Metcalf  29:53

We move in together, get married, and move across the country and start graduate school, all within a six month period.

Timothy Pauszek  29:59

Yep.

Miranda Metcalf  30:00

And so, uh, how'd that go?

Timothy Pauszek  30:04

Ugh... so... yeah, you were a big help in getting me into graduate school, and how did it go? God fucking damn it, it was brutal. I didn't handle it well. It was weird, because the things I thought were going to be really challenging, like, I thought the critiques of my work, and having to produce a whole bunch, I thought that was going to be the hard part. And what really shook me was being away from my community. All of these people and comforts that I relied on to kind of keep my - unbeknownst to me - anxiety in check, wasn't there anymore. My safety net was gone. And I just couldn't figure out how to fit in. I was angry all the time. It was a classic, I was a piece of shit at the center of the universe. I either thought I was better than or not as good as everybody. And I just couldn't figure out how to do life. And I learned... I mean, I learned a lot about reading and writing for research. And I learned a lot about my art practice. But what I really learned a lot about was myself. And maybe that sounds a little cliche, but yeah, I think I came out of graduate school with... on one hand, completely shattered. And on the other hand, feeling like, 'Okay, I know who I am.' And I didn't like that, necessarily. Like, I saw myself, and I didn't like everything I saw. But it led to accepting a lot of the bad things that I've worked on, and accepting, too, a lot of those things that I've come to kind of love. And know how to lean into certain things. And I'm a pretty emotional guy. I cry a lot. Anyone who's ever gone out drinking with me knows that. I cry a ton. And that's not a bad thing. But after grad school, getting sober, it was like, I learned that being emotional is not bad. But I know now more how to do it in a healthy way, rather than a bottle it all up and let it all out at once when I'm shit faced [way].

Miranda Metcalf  32:41

So despite all of that, that I was right there beside you for, and going through it with you - and I think that you summed it up really beautifully - you were making some pretty fucking cool work though. So you can be a miserable, anxious person, but you made some great work in graduate school.

Timothy Pauszek  33:12

Thanks.

Miranda Metcalf  33:12

And some of it is actually what's in the Five by Five. But maybe you could just talk kind of more generally about the ways in which graduate school, on the artistic side, sort of solidified your practice. Particularly maybe leaning into the number one theorist that you referenced in your thesis paper.

Timothy Pauszek  33:36

Yeah, so the school I went to, University of New South Wales in Sydney, was very theoretical school, Theory with a capital T. And I really wanted to respect that tradition. And so I looked to a very well-respected theorist, one of the great theorists of our time, Bruce Springsteen.

Miranda Metcalf  34:00

Our Lord and Savior.

Timothy Pauszek  34:01

Yeah. No, like I said, I was pretty miserable the whole time. And I was very angry. So when I got to this program that was very theoretical based, I was pissed. And I spent two years, rather than doing what I said as a joke just now of leaning in and getting everything I could get out of it, I was just an angry son of a bitch through it. I, at the time, was really angry about modern artists, or people doing color fields, and things that I quote-unquote thought, "I can do that." Right? "That's not hard." Like, I want to learn the ins and outs and technical minutiae of etching and litho. And like, fucking, I can paint a wall red for you if you want, but what's the point? And where that led me in my rage was, I started getting these ideas of like, well, if I can't make an etching of a beautiful landscape, because that's not theoretical, what I'm going to do is I'm going to build a wall and frame that, and then hang my beautiful etching on the wall that's actually the artwork. You know? I was gonna do, like, trade labor as art for my theory, so that I could design wallpaper that looks pretty and kind of get away with it, you know? And that led me to looking at Ellsworth Kelly. And he's got a series, "Red Yellow Blue III," 1966. And it's exactly what it sounds like. It's three big paintings, one's red, one's yellow, one's blue. And I was like, well, if I zoomed in to these sign paintings that I used to watch my dad make when I was a little kid - for our little league baseball field, like, they would hang on the outfield fence - if I zoomed in close enough, I can get to red, yellow, and blue. And so I started doing that. I started recreating these signs that my dad painted, but only painting a cropped up portion of it. And one of them actually was eventually completely yellow. And what I ended up realizing is, trying to get this flat piece of yellow completely flat, I couldn't do it. Because it was a painting. It had texture. I just couldn't get that away. And so I started thinking about how your materials that you use really matter. You know, if you want that perfectly flat, smooth [look], you go and print it. If you want texture, you go and paint it. If you want it to be sculptural, you use ceramics or glass. The materials matter. And that kind of got me into some actual Theory with a capital T of New Materialism, where your materials are a collaborator. And so it started out with rage and pure hatred, and lived there for at least two years, but it moved on to something a little more insightful, I think. And looking at, like, the skills that my dad taught me, who's quote-unquote "just" a factory worker, I was like, wait a minute. I'm using these skills in graduate level art school. Like, my dad's got to be something more... like, there's more here. And that work eventually led me to my final thesis, which was... it was gonna be, my whole thesis statement was like, "Can I make my dad an artist?" You know, that was my thesis statement, like, "Can I make a factory laborer the same status as a fine artist?" Because you have - in undergrad sociology, they'll talk about this - you have prestige, and you have money, basically. And you can be making a lot of money and not have a lot of prestige. You know, go be a plumber, you'll make a lot of money. But you're a plumber, right? People look at you like a plumber. Go be a college professor, you're probably not going to make that much money. But fuck, you're at professor at a university, right? So I was trying to balance these two things out. And I was going to make these images about my dad's work shirts. And as it kind of went on, I realized, the more I made work about my dad, yeah, I was showing him this kind of reverence or whatever you want to call it, but my name was still on the work. And everyone would say, 'Wow, Tim, this is great!' And my dad was still "just" a factory worker. And so what I ended up doing instead is I took his work shirts, and they have all these ink splatters on them. And -

Miranda Metcalf  38:48

Because?

Timothy Pauszek  38:49

- Because my dad makes offset lithography ink for a living. Or he did before he retired. And so I stretched the shirts over stretcher bars, and I framed them, and I hung them up on the wall, and I wrote about them as fine art objects. And I put his name on the wall. And so I didn't really have a graduate MFA thesis show. My dad did. And I was a quote-unquote, I call it a "Duchampian Curator." And so I was like, 'No, I'm going to take the back seat. I'm going to let my dad have a graduate show.' And so in my paper, at the very beginning, I have something to the effect of like, 'This is for my dad, who, as far as I'm concerned, gets an MFA out of this.'

Miranda Metcalf  39:31

I feel like when you're talking about raising the factory worker to the status of an artist, do you think that what you're essentially talking about is raising the labor that they do? That it's actually giving value to the labor, maybe, more than the person as an abstract?

Timothy Pauszek  39:50

Yeah, definitely. It's valuing skill and craft and those things, like we were talking about at the beginning with the locomotive, those things take - I mean, my dad knows more about litho ink than I ever will. Right? I got into Tamarind, I'm a fine art printer, people call me a master printer, blah blah blah. But my dad who makes litho ink, and my uncle who's a commercial offset lithographer, they know more about printing and ink than I ever will. Guaranteed. They know the formulas, they know how to troubleshoot. I had an internship at Gamblin, and my dad and my uncle both did this to me separately - I was like, 'Hey, Dad, I got to make a 50 pound batch of ink today! This was awesome!' Blah, blah, blah. He goes, '50 pounds! That's cute. My smallest is 10,000 pounds.' And my uncle, I was talking with him, I print like... maybe the biggest edition I've ever done is 50. And there's some wiggle room in there, right? For what they look like. You know, he's printing 10,000 copies of things that are double sided. Four color, double sided.

Miranda Metcalf  39:54

And perfect.

Timothy Pauszek  39:55

And perfect. Right. And so I think there's so much [that goes] into that trade labor that we don't really recognize. And yeah, okay, maybe it's not the most creative thing in the world. But it's not the most creative thing in the world if you only look at it from like, who designed the thing that's being printed. Right? If you need to know how to take that machine apart, clean it, and keep it running, and hit a deadline, there's a lot of creativity that actually goes into doing that labor.

Miranda Metcalf  41:22

One of the things I really liked about what you wrote about the final thesis show was you described your father as an artist who did a 30 year residency, was it? What was the wording?

Timothy Pauszek  41:37

Yeah, yeah. I could probably just read it if you wanted me to. I wrote a fake catalog essay for my dad's solo exhibition. And I talked about how he was a contemporary of Jackson Pollock and Richard Prince and all these guys. Mark Tobey. And I basically wrote him this fake catalog excerpt. And I used -

Miranda Metcalf  42:00

Do you want to just read it? Because it's not long, and it's really good.

Timothy Pauszek  42:03

Okay, I'll read it.

Miranda Metcalf  42:04

Okay.

Timothy Pauszek  42:04

You ready? So I wrote this fake catalogue essay excerpt for my dad's solo show. And it just says, "...echoing John Cage's rule to cast aside analysis in the midst of creation, it is finally here in the heterogeneous assemblage of Pauszek's controversial paintings that one can explore the artist's intention against a juxtaposition of the iconic and profoundly infamous giants of the art world. Concerned with issues of mark-making, chance, and humour, the artist deconstructs the phantasmagorical backdrop of the American factory informed by years of immersive research, which is realized through a referent akin to Sol le Wit, Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey, and Richard Prince. Interested in notions of chance, Pouszek's provisional composition 'Cyan (no. 5)' was subjected to - as was his entire oeuvre - the indiscriminate will of clattering post-war machines over a period of thirty years. The revelatory work 'Magenta #29' is a clear inquiry into the process of Pollock, whose famous splatter questions the very notions of randomness and purpose. However, after the completion of 'Yellow' he severed his connexion with Pollock, as Pollock's admiration of Mark Tobey became problematic for the artist who sought to challenge the ideas of mysticism championed by Tobey in favour of his religious heritage rooted in Catholicism. The significance of this divide comes full circle with Pauszek's first solo exhibition taking place in Canberra, Australia, where mere kilometers away is housed Pollock's 'Blue Poles,' which made history in its purchase by the Australian Government for two million dollars and was directly inspired by Toby's Bars and Flails. Departing from the expressionism that had dominated his career to this point and finding solace amongst the palimpsest of scribbles on batch notes and instructions salvaged from the factory bins, Pauszek created the final rhizomatic work 'Key (Untitled Composition in Black),' which is a hybrid of traditional oil and modern acrylic that is in dialogue with Richard Prince's joke drawings and is an exploration interrogating the ultimate joke; The haunting realization that is the futility of our lives embodied by work shirts, and manifested as paintings that smell like yellow." So to write that paragraph, I looked up a Google article that was something like, "30 Art Words That Should be Ditched in the New Year," and I crammed in about 26 of them. So it sounds pretty good, but it's total bullshit, it's made up, none of it's true, and I don't even think grammatically or definition wise, it makes any sense.

Miranda Metcalf  44:52

No, it does.

Timothy Pauszek  44:53

Does it? Some of it does.

Miranda Metcalf  44:54

Some of it makes pretty good sense. Yeah. And so like, that was about tee shirts that your dad wore to a factory that you stretched over canvases.

Timothy Pauszek  44:56

Yeah. Yeah, it is. And so with that ending thing, my thesis is called "Process Colors," which speaks to CMYK printing. And then there was, of course, "Modern Baseball," which has the Ellsworth Kelly reference to "Red Yellow and Blue." But the whole thing about paintings smelling like yellow, the rest of that thesis keeps saying "shirts that smell like xylene." And that chapter in it is called "shirts that smell like yellow." And so when I got to take my first printing class in college, I opened a can of yellow litho ink, and the smell hit me. And it was my dad's work shirt. And I called him up, and I was like, 'Dad, what do you do?' Because I had known he made ink. But you know, I was thinking like, ballpoint pens or something like that. And so just over the phone, he was like, 'Oh, I make offset litho ink for the commercial printing industry.' And so I, without really realizing it, fell into the family trade.

Miranda Metcalf  46:06

So we've been spending a lot of time talking about your dad, and how he basically did your graduate school thesis for you.

Timothy Pauszek  46:17

Oh, yeah. No, I checked out fully by that point.

Miranda Metcalf  46:19

Yeah. He did the work, anyway, the hard work. The making. You were just a researcher. But your mom is actually kind of at the center of the pieces that are going to be at Print Austin.

Timothy Pauszek  46:33

Yeah. I do talk about my relationship with my dad a lot in my work, but the relationship we have is because of my mom. And my mom was great. Like, I miss her a ton. Okay, so she passed away when I was 13. And at that point, my brothers had moved away to college. And so it went from being a household family of five to just me and my dad. And the dog, the dog was there too.  Marty, God rest his soul. He's buried in the backyard, actually. So he's still technically there. Point is, it was just the two of us. And so my dad and I got super close in a way that my brothers and he didn't, just because that's what it was. And so my mom, I've always made art about her as well. Like I said, in high school, I made these prints about her. I revisited them in college. And a lot of it's been trying to figure that out, or at least keep it down. At least till it all came spilling out 13 years later, when I finished graduate school. 15 years later at that point. And so yeah, the work that's in Print Austin is a series that I did for graduate school about her travel spoon collection. And so for her, she collected these spoons, or had her friends or whoever bring them back for her. She just had these spoons, right? We didn't take vacations. I don't think... my dad worked at an ink factory, my mom did something with accounts or something or other, like, she worked kind of as a receptionist at a doctor's office. And the first vacation I remember taking was in sixth grade, we went to my cousin's wedding in Florida. And that was a huge deal. Which I guess would have been the only vacation we took. Because she passed away two years later. And so these travel spoons, in a way, were kind of like her way of experiencing the world when she couldn't go anywhere.

Miranda Metcalf  47:03

Marty.  And so what you mean by travel spoons, just so people can picture it... it's the little souvenir spoons, not functional spoons, but like the ones that you see at...

Timothy Pauszek  48:42

Truckstops and gift shops and wherever shops.

Miranda Metcalf  48:46

...Outside temples in Thailand. Just souvenir places, [and] they usually have an icon or something that represents the location at the top.

Timothy Pauszek  48:56

Yeah. And so the work that you'll see in the Five by Five, you've got - there's one that's "My Collection: After Mom's." So once mom passed away, I kept collecting these things. I bought them to a point where my dad kind of had to be like -because he was paying for them - he had to be like, 'You don't have to buy every single one you see!' And so there's the one that's "My Collection: After Mom's," and there's one that's "Dad's Collection: After Mom's," which are these spoons that he found after she passed away, up in our attic. And I think there's one... so there's one [with spoons] that we had gotten from Thailand, Japan, and Las Vegas. So it was kind of like, "Thanks For the Wedding Rings," because you have my mom's wedding rings. And so it was like -

Miranda Metcalf  49:36

Because Thailand, Japan, and Las Vegas, that's...

Timothy Pauszek  49:39

Where we got married in Vegas, at SGCI, where we flew through on our way to our honeymoon, in Japan, and then we did our honeymoon in Thailand. So they all kind of tell these stories. The other one that's in there is, I think it's "Family Vacations," and that one's like the Mickey Mouse themed ones, because of that time we went to Florida. And I just remember those. There's another one in the series that's not in the Five by Five, it's "Mom and Dad," and that's a Mickey and Minnie Mouse one that they probably got on their honeymoon or something. And there's one titled "Brothers," where it's two Eiffel Tower spoons, one that Matt got and one that Ray got. And just, they each tell a story. And so the spoons themselves represent these mile markers; "Vegas: Before and After," the ones she bought in Vegas when she went, the ones I bought, when she was gone, at our wedding. "Vermont: Before and After," when she went to visit her brother, when I went later in life without her. And they all, through the titles, tell those stories. "Vermont: Before and After," "Vegas: Before and After," "Thanks for the Wedding Rings," things like that. So I kinda like to play with the title to give you a little bit more information into my personal story. But you get to kind of make up stories from my work as it goes. At least I hope you can. I tend not to... even though everything I draw is pretty personal, it's usually, I hope, vague enough that you can bring your own narrative to it. And if you want a little bit of insight into my work, you can read the title usually. And that gives you maybe a jumping off point of where I might be coming from.

Miranda Metcalf  51:18

So why do you think you're drawn to making work about your family? And about where you're from?

Timothy Pauszek  51:29

I have no idea. I think... I guess if I have to figure it out right here, right now, it's like, I miss this thing I had. Like, I knew life a certain way. and things were easy. And then when mom died, it was like, everything got harder. And I grew up a little bit faster than I would have liked to. And I don't know, I guess maybe I have this longing for home. For this place that feels safe and secure and where I'm supposed to be, you know. Yeah. That's kind of what I'm going with, anyway.

Miranda Metcalf  52:41

I think that's beautiful. That feels right to me. And I think it's something that a lot of people can connect with. You know, even if you didn't lose a parent young or have something disruptive, just that sense of stability and home and place and routine and knowingness, that can come from just a stable childhood, you know? And particularly, these last years in this country have felt so terribly unstable.

Timothy Pauszek  53:24

Yeah.

Miranda Metcalf  53:24

And I think we all can identify with, like, wanting to work our way back.

Timothy Pauszek  53:30

Yeah. I mean, who doesn't want to be safe in their home? Food, water and shelter, right? And I mean, I had it good. Like, I'm not trying to say I didn't. My life's fucking awesome. And my dad and I had a great relationship. And no, it's not perfect, but things were awesome. And he helped me go to college, and like, I had a lot of good stuff going for me. But yeah, I think you're right, I think that is something a lot of people can relate to. Whether you have the good thing and you don't want to lose it, or you had it and you lost it, or you never had it and you want it. Yeah, I think that's what it's about, is I miss home.

Miranda Metcalf  53:54

Tim?

Timothy Pauszek  54:02

Yeah.

Miranda Metcalf  54:10

Where can people find you and follow you and see your work?

Timothy Pauszek  54:30

Yeah, so I have a website. It is timpauszek.com. And I've got an Instagram, which is @timpauszek_studio. I also run the Santa Fe Printing House with my friend and partner Josh Orsburn, and you can find us at santafeprintinghouse.com, as well as on Instagram @santafeprintinghouse.

Miranda Metcalf  55:02

Beautiful. We didn't even get to talk about Sante Fe Printing House, I realized. Well, we'll have to have you and Josh back on, together. That'd be a good one.

Timothy Pauszek  55:12

Or at least Josh. Or, you know, do an episode with just Josh and then one with Santa Fe Printing House. I'm taking over the podcast! Let me out in front of the mic once, and you're never putting me back. Co-hosts from now on. I'm even gonna join Reinaldo's episodes! No, I won't do that.

Miranda Metcalf  55:36

Well, Tim, you remain my favorite, very, very favorite person to talk to. I fell in love talking to you. Because we were long distance. All we had was talking. And I feel really honored to have been witness to everything in recent years in your practice, and in your personal development, because it's been beautiful to see. And I'm really, really proud to be your wife.

Timothy Pauszek  56:09

Aw, thanks, love. I really appreciate it. And I just want to put it out there, formally, on the record: when we started this podcast, I hated it. I hated doing the editing. You hated everything back then, though. Well, I hated everything, but I especially hated this podcast. And it was a great idea. We've gotten so many opportunities because of it. You were right. I was wrong. And I'm sorry.

Miranda Metcalf  56:42

If you liked today's episode, we have a Patreon where you can help us keep the lights on and get bonus content, like shoptalk shorts, where our editor Timothy Pauszek digs deep on materials, processes, and techniques with past guests. Also, if monetary support isn't in the cards right now, you can leave a review for us on your podcast listening app of choice or buy something from our sponsors and tell them Hello, Print Friend sent you. But as always, the very best way you can support this podcast is by listening and sharing with your fellow print friends around the world. And that's our show for this week. Join me again next week when my guest will be Hayley Takahashi. We talk about her journey as an art history student turned artist, the particulars and complexities of drawing on Ukiyo-e imagery as a Japanese American artist, her long standing self portrait practice, and how it shows up in her current work. You won't want to miss it. This episode, like all episodes, was written and produced by me, Miranda Metcalf, with editing by Timothy Pauszek and music by Joshua Webber. I'll see you next week.