A 26-year-old Eckerd College student serves tea, works in his mother's beauty shop and volunteers with kids. In his actions live his art, the painter says.
Visible just below his T-shirt sleeve, Timm Mettler wears a message tattooed on his right biceps: “The best is yet to come.”
It’s the adage Mettler’s father left in his will for his kids when he died in 2002. The words are framed by a banner towed by a plane, a reference to album art by Ken Mettler’s favorite band, the Beach Boys.
For Timm Mettler, the story behind the tattoo is key. A 26-year-old St. Petersburg, Fla., artist and second-year student at Eckerd College, he insists the inky scars are nothing without a backstory.
“They are meaningless,” Mettler says, “but at the same time, they’re only meaningful within the context of your own life.”
Mettler is a painter who knows there’s some fundamental link between the art he makes and the people he encounters, but he isn’t exactly sure what’s at the heart of that relationship. So while he works through this puzzle, he serves tea downtown, helps in his mother’s beauty shop and volunteers for a kid’s arts program. If it seems a disconnected life, it isn’t. At the center of everything Mettler does — and at the center of his art — is community.
Art, he says, needs context, just as tattoos need backstories. It needs the context of the community in which it’s created, the community that should, in theory, dictate the art’s meaning.
“I'm just trying to come to terms with how my actions as somebody who is an artist meets my community,” he says.
This summer, Mettler’s weeks begin on Mondays with 16 kids at Wildwood Community Center.
Between 10 a.m. and noon, Mettler and his mentoring partner, Jessica Quinn, teach fourth- and fifth-graders from the Midtown neighborhood about Salvador Dali’s work. The program, called “Egg-Centric Surreal Summer,” runs through mid-August.
During one of the first sessions, Quinn and Mettler helped the kids make egg pinatas.
Though Mettler and Quinn work together on those Monday mornings, Quinn is the only one getting paid for the job. Mettler says he’s working for the experience.
Like many people, Mettler started drawing as a kid. At church, he spent his time drawing on pew cards; his mom still has one framed. Later, his passion for art grew during his years in an art magnet program at Gibbs High School.
It’s strange now, he says, to watch the next generation of artists begin their own journey of discovery. When he was younger, he says, “this is what I was feeding off of, this life force.”
Part of Mettler’s work with the community happens at Studio@620, a downtown art gallery on First Avenue South. He met artistic director and studio co-founder Bob Devin Jones there about four years ago and has since made Devin Jones his mentor.
Last September, Mettler displayed his work at Studio@620 in a three-week-long show called “A Series of Shifting Landscapes.” The show’s opening night attracted a couple hundred people; Devin Jones says the studio sold six or seven pieces in the first night.
Mettler’s success at the show, Devin Jones says, can be attributed to his accessibility. His oil and acrylic paintings depicted landscapes with blocks of bold reds, oranges, blues and greens. They seem abstract, but the overlapping shapes form horizontal planes.
His inspiration is urban and suburban Gulf Coast Florida seen by the mass of people who drive through it daily with little notice. “It is these landscapes of banal disregard that inform Timm’s work, both unconsciously and deliberately,” Daniel Nelson, an MFA candidate at Hunter College, wrote in a brochure for the show.
“He’s trying to communicate something with his art,” Devin Jones says. “It’s not up in an ivory tower.”
Art without purpose riles Mettler. “Are you just a huckster that's trying to fashion or craft some piece of metal or some painting and then try to pawn it off on somebody else by saying it'll provide some type of faux enlightenment?”
Beyond engaging the community through their reaction to art with meaning, Mettler also says engaging community can mean gathering people in one place.
Earlier this year, he and Devin Jones hatched a plan to breathe art and commerce into the Crislip Arcade, a historic open-air shopping mall on Central Avenue slated for demolition. Their grand plan includes a bakery, a tea/coffee shop, a custom framing store, an international newsstand and, of course, an art gallery.
“You need that anchor that people go to on a daily basis,” Devin Jones says.
If all goes according to that plan, space in the gallery would be Mettler’s.
Four or five days a week, Mettler can be found behind the counter at Hooker Tea Co., a cafe on Beach Drive and Third Avenue North. Mettler stands in the sky-blue room, sipping a blend of jasmine pearl green tea and iron goddess oolong out of a red mug that beams Las Vegas. Here, people come to Mettler not for his art but for his tea expertise.
Selling tea is just another way for Mettler to keep in touch with an audience. Here, Mettler is the advice-giver, the tea-maker.
Standing 6 feet 3 inches, Mettler flits between the counter and a floor-to-ceiling wall of 40-ounce tea tins, helping the few patrons who trickle in on a rainy July evening.
Here, he sweats. The AC isn’t working.
Fridays mean curlers, nail polish and the occasional song and dance for Mettler. Once a week, Mettler works for his mother’s salon, Shear Delight, at Belleair East Health Care Center, a nursing and rehabilitation center in Clearwater.
Here, Mettler mostly helps out by bringing patients to the center’s salon, taking out curlers and calling time when a customer’s half-hour of drying is up.
“If some of the ladies get antsy,” says his mother, Dale Mettler, “he holds their hands.”
At Belleair, it’s Mettler’s job to interact with people.
“He’s social with everybody, which is really kind of neat,” Dale Mettler says. “… It’s a happy spot in a not-so-happy place.”
Still, maybe the best is yet to come.
The disconnected threads of Mettler’s week all come together in his two passions: a constant dialog with the community, and art that has its context in that community.
“All I ever really want to do is paint,” he says. “I live to paint. That's my thing. I can't do anything else, you know?”
He’s thinking about going to Chicago for graduate school, a move that Devin Jones says would be a good one. “If he goes to Chicago, he’ll be in different conversations, and you need that.”
But it’s the environment and the people in it that determine the conversation for Mettler, regardless of geography.
“If you say you make art and you don't make it in order to engage an audience or engage other artists specifically,” he says, “what are you making?”