Staff Creatives: Tim Creswick

Creativity runs high among College of Fine Arts staff members, both in their day jobs in the college supporting our research and educational mission and in their personal lives. The college has an unusually high number of practicing artists, musicians and performers — many of them alumni — on our teams.

Tim Creswick (B.F.A., Studio Art, 2009) is the director of faculty advancement in the Dean’s Office.

How many years have you worked in the College of Fine Arts? 

I have worked in the College of Fine Arts — first in the Department of Theatre and Dance, then in the Dean’s Office — for the last 15 years.

Describe your creative practice. 

I am a painter. I produce watercolors and oil paintings, as well as drawings. I have always been interested in the way old frescoes or old buildings decay by pieces of the surface falling away, leaving a textured, but often white (or grimy black) surface. These are usually random disruptions of the pictorial field, unassociated with the imagery of the object itself. For the last many years, I’ve been attempting different ways to reproduce this effect, without waiting for 300 years or a natural disaster. My recent iteration involves painting still lifes with oil, but blocking of sections of the canvas with tape before I paint it, then removing the tape at the end of the painting to restore random sections of the painting to the blank canvas.

How did you get started in your creative practice? 

My mom was an artist, and I used to help her with wall murals when I was very young. (“Help” is strong here. More like I kept her company and bothered her.) Then, in fourth grade, my teacher had the class paint a small flower in a pot with watercolors. It was a flower with vines coming out of a clay ceramic pot. Everyone else painted a stereotypical daisy with yellow center and white round petals. I tried to make it look like the actual pot and flower. I realized then that I was better at this than my peers, and I’ve probably had a creative practice ever since.

What does a typical day look like when you’re balancing both your work and creative passions? 

When things are working well, I paint maybe one weekend a month. That means I set up a still life and spend about four or five hours for two days on it. The “balance” is hard to achieve.

Any advice for students as they think about their professional pathways? 

You are not your job.

How do you define success as an artist? How has that definition evolved over time? 

My ideal definition for success of an artist would be whether someone is making enough money from selling artworks to pay all their bills. I am not meeting that ideal. So, I define success for myself as simply maintaining a practice and creating some paintings that I like. This definition has evolved for me over time in two different ways. Earlier on in my life, I considered success as an artist to be receiving recognition as an artist, having a gallery represent you or being in exhibitions of note. As I’ve matured, I’ve separated the whims of the art market from what counts as success, and I am now much more interested in making things I like than in making things I think others will like.