Todd Mrozinski 'Trees Among Us' is Satisfyingly Weird

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Fellenz Hill. 2018. Etching. 6"x4". at the Trees Among Us exhibit by Todd Mrozinski in the Marian Art Gallery at Mount Mary University.

Todd Mrozinski’s work might be familiar to local art enthusiasts; his work has been in shows at a number of local galleries, including Portrait Society and Frank Juarez Gallery. He also had a 30-year retrospective of his work at the Thelma Sadoff Center for the Arts in Fond du Lac last year. His artistic output is worth marveling over. He painted literally hundreds of portrait silhouettes when he was the 2015-2016 Pfister Hotel artist-in-residence. If you didn’t know better, you might assume that all his output was the product of a studio collective calling themselves “Todd Mrozinski.”

Of course, that’s not the case, and one can tell from the work itself that it’s all of a single mind and hand. He tends to work on a single subject in series—such as the aforementioned silhouette project—exploring it exhaustively. Examples of one of those journeys into subject matter, in three separate bodies of work, is on display in the Marian Art Gallery at Mount Mary University (through Friday, Feb. 15), where Mrozinski offers 31 recent works on paper of trees in a show appropriately titled “Trees Among Us.” The subject matter itself isn’t particularly enthralling; after all, trees are well represented in the annals of art history. However, Mrozinski’s use of graphite, India ink and printmaking in concert with odd compositional choices outpaces the limitations baked into the content.

Given the quaintness of Mrozinski’s chosen subject, mostly in suburban rather than sublime settings, his willingness to go large is satisfyingly weird. It’s rare that scaling up in size benefits a composition. More often, it masks inadequacies. But the five-foot by two-foot graphite-on-paper drawing Winter Walk, and a handful of others, takes advantage of size and scale–or more accurately, our expectations about those issues in relation to his settings. The work also takes advantage of the velvety wonders of graphite itself, especially where he’s burnished the powdered pigment onto the paper. The manner in which Mrozinski renders branches and foliage owes a lot to French Barbizon painters like Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Charles-Francois Daubigny, which I’m sure he’s happy to admit, though he magpies scrupulously, winks a little and moves on in his own direction. This drawing in particular features two somewhat sad and defoliated winter trees foregrounded against a side street and sidewalk receding into the distance. Dark late afternoon shadows paint their bases and dramatically anchor the foreground.

Verticality also serves his drawings well. One of several works titled Summer Walk features a perfectly plumb telephone pole rising in the space where the missing foliage of an adjacent misshapen tree should be. It’s another sad asymmetrical misfit. The rising odd couple interact incongruously with the suburban street setting, almost as if they are aware of the strangeness of the relationship.

Even more than scale and verticality, what distinguishes “Trees” is the volume of work. Not works, though there are many, but work itself, as a trace of dedication, observation and cumulative experimentation. There are, of course, pieces in the show that aren’t as successful as others. I’m not as drawn to his prints, for instance; however, even those strike the viewer as ongoing research for the greater project of seeing and making.

Pablo Picasso famously said, “inspiration exists, but it has to find you working,” which makes a lot of sense for someone as productive as Picasso was. I’ve wondered if this quote was merely the convenient rationalization of an artist who produced like a genius on amphetamines. I think my skepticism is due to the fact that I, and many others I know, are more likely to have to wait for creative revelation while scrubbing in the shower, while others can simply chase it down by scrubbing pigment onto paper. It begs the question: Is art-making and thought one moment or two? A chicken-or-egg-issue, perhaps, but combining it all into one thoughtful, kinetic motion has paid dividends for Mrozinski.