Listen to the interview here!
Toni Reece: Hi there. This is Toni Reece. Welcome to the Get Inspired! Project for Berks County Living Magazine. Today I have Matthew Mazurkiewicz with me. Hi, Matthew.
Matthew Mazurkiewicz: Aloha. How are you?
Toni: I’m great. How are you doing today?
Matthew: I’m okay.
Toni: You are?
Matthew: Just okay.
Toni: Alright. Just okay.
Matthew: The sun isn't shining quite enough.
Toni: No, but it’s going to come out.
Matthew: It is.
Toni: Okay. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Matthew: Well, let’s see. I’m born and raised in Berks County. I’m the father of three boys. I’ve got twin 5-year-old boys, and an 8-year-old. They’re all at school right now and not following me around. If they were here, you would hear it. I graduated from Wyomissing High School in 1994, then went onto the Pennsylvania School of Art and Design and the School of Visual Arts in New York City. I lived in New York until 2001. I actually lived there up until about three weeks before 9/11, which is kind of strange. Then I moved back to Reading, and less than a year later I was married to a girl I didn’t know.
Toni: And what a lovely girl she is.
Matthew: Yes, she does well.
Toni: Should we go into the Project?
Matthew: Sure.
Toni: What does inspiration mean to you?
Matthew: I think inspiration is a perpetual process. I’m constantly gathering things that inspire me. I live three lives. I’m an artist. I do paintings and show at galleries. I have a 40-hour week. I work as a graphic designer. When I’m not doing that, I’m a father of three crazy boys and try to be a husband somewhere in there too at the same time. Inspiration is … sometimes it happens in between any one of those three events.
Toni: Matthew, when was the last time you can recall being inspired?
Matthew: The last time I was inspired … wow ….
Toni: When you said, “Wow, that’s pretty cool.”
Matthew: It seems to happen all the time. Artistically it could just be seeing a really great shadow. Actually, it was brilliantly sunny the other day and there were these great shadows raking off of this building that I work at. It makes you want to whip out your camera. Being a flaky artist type, you’re kind of always scanning around looking at inspiration. Things just kind of happen upon you, sometimes by chance, luck.
Toni: It sounds to me that part of what inspiration means to you is noticing things.
Matthew: Yes.
Toni: Whether it’s noticing something in the middle of all the jobs and the hats that you wear, or noticing a shadow on a building, or just noticing something. That’s what it sounds like you’re inspired by. “Oh wow! Take notice of that!”
Matthew: Yes. A lot of the times it gets me in trouble.
Toni: How so?
Matthew: Especially if I’m trying to mind the family and not having the kids run out of the driveway and into the street. I’ll be like, “Wow – look at that great thing over there. It’s really great!” It might be translated as ADD or something like that, but I’m fascinated by the world around me, and it’s always changing. Those few moments when I find time to do something self-satisfying other than duty like the work and keeping the kids fed and alive and keeping my wife from killing me, inspiration comes in a very concentrated form.
Toni: How do you put that inspiration or the fascination into practice here in Berks County?
Matthew: I’m always sketching things. I’m always painting things. Again, it appears that I’m always distracted. I have a studio in my basement, and sometimes inspiration will hit me at two o’clock in the morning when my brain is at rest and everybody’s asleep. My brain says, “Hey, remember that neat thing or event? I think you should do something about that.” I’ll go downstairs in my pajamas at two in the morning and sling some paint around. Sometimes it becomes something; sometimes I just wind up being messy.
I’m always documenting things. I think Berks County is very, very important. I’ve moved away. I lived in New York City, and as neat as that was, I was always very, very homesick. There’s something about the landscape and the people. There’s still a large working class group of people that I’m very inspired by that are working very hard. You see them.
Toni: Unfortunately, people don’t get to see these interviews, because I can see as you’re describing what inspires you and how you put that into practice, you almost seem inspired. It sounds as though how you put that into practice is really rallying around your community. It seems as though you’re inspired by Berks County.
Matthew: I am. I’m fascinated by the people. You can put 400 Berks Countians in the room, and eventually they’d wind up still talking to each other, whether they come from a really seedy part of town or whether they come from Reading Boulevard. They’ll eventually congregate somehow.
Toni: This work that you sling about in the middle of the night, where does it get shown?
Matthew: I just took down a show I had at Penn State Berks at the Freyberger Gallery. That was a great show that I had up for a month. There was a lot of recent work there. It was a really great show I shared with my friend and fellow artist/photographer Jen Lindsay. Marilyn Fox was really accommodating and set up a great show for us.
Toni: That’s another way you put it into practice here in Berks County is by allowing those of us in the community to view your inspiration.
Matthew: Yes. It’s cool to have people that actually reach out to you and say, “Hey, I like what you do.”
Toni: Yes, that is pretty cool.
Matthew: “Throw it on my wall. Maybe you’ll sell something.” It doesn’t always happen, though.
Toni: Who in Berks County inspires you?
Matthew: I think there’s a lot of people that work jobs not just in the industrial, retail … I’m fascinated by the people that are hard at work, that work 9 to 5 and still find time to raise families and all that stuff. There’s just a terrific collection of people in this whole county, from farmers to artists – everybody – to me! Crazy people like me.
Toni: Is there one in particular you can think of?
Matthew: One person in particular?
Toni: Yes.
Matthew: I think this is a trick question.
Toni: No …
Matthew: If I could round off and say what comes to mind is I’m constantly inspired by what … if I can talk about my boys as a collective whole, because the three of them are always together. They are always bouncing ideas off each other and to me. They come down to the studio and hang out with me, and they always say, “Why don’t you try and make something that looks like a butterfly coming out of a toaster?” or something like that. I’ll say, “Okay.” I’ll do it. That’s my dirty secret. I think the inspiration for everything I do comes from these crazy suggestions from my boys.
Toni: So they do inspire you.
Matthew: They inspire me a lot. It’s just kind of cool. When you’re not caught up in the craziness of things I think, “I made these crazy kids!” and that’s kind of cool.
Toni: That is kind of cool. So, Matthew, what would you want your legacy to be?
Matthew: I think being mentioned somewhere. When George the Miser XIV has the episode 35 of the passing scene, if I could be on one page in there somewhere, and there would be a picture of me slinging paint, that would be cool. I would just like to be known as a multi-tasker.
Toni: A multi-tasker …
Matthew: That sounds really, really corporate.
Toni: You want your legacy to be that you’re a multi-tasker.
Matthew: Yes. That should be on my headstone.
Toni: That would be on the plaque.
Matthew: “He dealt with a lot of crap really well.” I don’t want to fade into obscurity.
Toni: I can't see that happening. I really, really appreciate you being such a great sport about this and coming in and doing the Get Inspired! Project.
Matthew: Thank you for tolerating me. My pleasure.
