Alice Zinnes

ARTIST STATEMENT

For years after graduate school, I painted the landscape of northeastern Pennsylvania and Delaware Water Gap, along with complex silk flower arrangements and still lifes.  Painting directly from observation, in front of the motif, provided a vehicle for discovering not only space and light – which, like my idol Cezanne I was very concerned with – but also painterly forms, movements and colors, themselves metaphors for the combined experience of perception, memory, mood and thought.  The canvases, with their energetic brushstrokes of sensuous color, their layered paint weaving in and out of interlocking, even conflicting forms, revealed my deep sensitivity to the chaos of our world.  At the same time, this attack on the canvas, based on close observation, created a watery, mysterious, musical, and dreamlike effect.  The paintings were done over a long period of time.  Viewing them can also be done over time, each viewing suggesting new ideas and images.

Provoked to visual explosions by fiction, poetry, and mythology, my current paintings and drawings contain the spirit of the storyteller in the guise of the abstract adventurer. Not illustrations or literal translations, my recent work transforms ancient myths into mysterious worlds where the boundaries between underworld and waking earth are traversable, terror coexists with joy, and loss yields to renewal. My art pieces, inspired by The Ramayana, Ovid’s Metamorphosis and the ancient Roman novel, The Golden Ass by Apuleius, are quiet abstract landscapes of mythic spaces where intangible creatures become tangible emotions, and paint is transformed into the unknowable depths of our shared humanity.

In some ways my early and recent work are mirror images of each other.  My older work depicted the light and space of an actual motif, with underlying suggestions of poetry.  My current dreamscapes are cast deep in the rich colors of myth and poetry – the language and pictures we create to understand the world at its least understandable – but the landscapes I painted so long ago remain in my bones and blood, and are at root how I organize my current painterly worlds.

BIO

Zinnes has had seven solo exhibitions in NYC, including at Causey Contemporary Fine Art, Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, Tribes Gallery, and The Art Center at Queens College, CUNY, a number of solo shows upstate NY at the Alliance Gallery (Narrowsburg) and CANO (Oneonta), as well as been included in many group exhibitions.  Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, New York Newsday, New York Arts Magazine, Art New England, The Queens Tribune, Revolt Magazine, Art News, The Indypendent, Abstract Art Online and From The Mayor’s Doorstep.  She has twice been interviewed on NPR’s affiliate station, WJFF.  Zinnes has received awards from the National Academy of Design, and fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Arts, and Cummington Community for the Arts.  She is in many private and public collections. Currently Alice Zinnes is an adjunct Full Professor at The Pratt Institute.