White Serpent 2015 Painting

Tim Merry creates paintings and sculptures with highly worked surfaces, using nontraditional materials. His paintings, inspired by personal events, evoke ancient walls, the natural world, and a range of emotional states. Merry was born in Bay City, Michigan in 1953. Two years later, he and his family moved to a farm in Vassar, Michigan. Merry has noted that, “Growing up on a farm fundamentally shaped me as a person,” fostering self-reliance, a strong work ethic, and a close relationship with the land. He was encouraged in making art and in finding Native American artifacts in the local Sand Hills. This was the beginning of a receptivity to other cultures that has continued to influence Merry’s work as an artist. Over a period of seven years, Merry worked his way through college, starting at Delta College and graduating from Western Michigan University with a BFA in 1979. During those years he created a series of site-specific mixed-media sculptures in whose talismanic qualities we can see the origins of his current paintings. His early pieces, influenced by the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as by his instructors, was rooted in Merry’s growing up on Lake Michigan, and the fishing and farm life he experienced there. He continuesto explore making art that reflects a strong sense of place. And while much of the early work no longer exists, Merry is currently recreating renderings of the pieces through his Lost Sculpture Drawings. In 1979, Merry moved to Boston where he and his wife in 1989 started a strategic branding and design firm with a roster of national clients. He continued to pursue his art through a series of phases that began in the early 1980’s with his Treasure series of mixed-media constructions, based on Aztec artifacts illegally salvaged from a sunken Spanish galleon. For the past three decades, Merry has created hundreds of Bridge Drawings, sketches on found paper of bridges from all over the world. He works on a number of paintings and series at the same time, and currently is creating Godship, a group of thirteen sculptural totems. In 1999, Merry began his series of paintings Signs and Symbols that explored a cosmic and earthy visual vocabulary that has become central to his work. In these pieces can be seen his acknowledged kinship with the painters Antoni Tapies and Anselm Kiefer, both of whom use the physical reality of paint and other materials to highly expressive ends.