Todd Mrozinski: Understanding Artists

Todd Mrozinski. Valentine Moon. Oil on Canvas. 2012.

An author's voice is carried by the weight of their words, and a poet's by their ability to elicit feeling; tactile, emotional or otherwise. Their words grip you as you read and compel you to experience something out of reach from even the masters of visual arts. They make you an active participant of their art by influencing your imagination. Text is much like painting or drawing, it takes continuous effort and careful thought, but where it differs is instead of working with strokes of matter, you're drawing from your personal library of knowledge to find exactly what you need to write and how you need to write it.

Todd Mrozinski's writing from his artist's statement from his time at Fellenz Woods to his analysis of European masterworks display an overwhelming understanding of art, specifically etching and painting as evident on his personal site, so much so that I, being unfamiliar with some of their intricate processes, learned more about art just by reading. Mrozinski likes to bring the physicality of creation into his artistic descriptions of old masters, specifically when he is describing Paul Cezanne's artistic process in painting,

"The clay-like paint is pushed, smeared and built like the mountain, Mount Sainte-Victoire, that he would paint over 60 times in his life."

Mrozinski goes further and draws a connection in art history between Cezanne's increasingly disjointed works (c. 1880) and the Cubism movement (c. 1910). Including details on the process as well as historical significance shows as a great understanding of these works. Also to be appreciated is the analysis of lesser known artist even among some of the most well known names in painting featured in the same gallery exibition.