Flounder
Tim Trelease was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. After earning a B.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design in 1987 and a M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1989, Trelease has been splitting time between making art, exhibiting, and teaching at RISD and three different boarding schools around the northeast.
Trelease finds poetic beauty in the post-industrial ruins and natural life cycles. He finds source material while exploring abandoned buildings in urban environments and studying botanical ephemera from nature.
Trelease has participated in dozens of group shows and launched a few solo exhibitions, including one at the Greeley Square Gallery in New York City, the Russell Gallery, in Deerfield, Massachusetts, and Paper City Studios, in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Tim has also staged avant-garde theater at Gallery A3, in Amherst, The Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and both The Knitting Factory and CBGB’s in New York City.
As a side venture, and added source of inspiration, Trelease has been working in the spirit of the rusticators, a group of artists and writers who traveled to Maine in the mid-1800s to paint and write. Trelease has intentionally walked in the footsteps of Thomas Cole, Frederich Church, Edward Hopper, Marsden Hartley, and Henry David Thoreau. He has been inspired by the physiognomy of nature, explained by Cesar Aira, as "a procedure of artistic geography, an aesthetic understanding of the world, a science of landscape." Trelease is attentive to the history of the places where he paints, the people, climate, fauna, flora, and prevailing wind.