[스크랩] (그림)정물화....극사실 Michael Zigmond

 

 

 

Two Calla Lillies in Blue Vase

oil on linen

38 x 48 inches

 

 

Pear in Glass

oil on linen

20 x 20 inches

 

 

 

Pear in Glass (blue ball)

oil on linen

22 x 28 inches

 

 

 

Three Green Pears

oil on linen

12 x 21 inches

 

 

 

 

Apple

oil on linen

12 x 13 inches

 

 

Single Red Pear

oil on linen

14 x 14 inches

 

 

 

Red Ball #2

oil on linen

50 x 48 inches

 

Looking back at my days as an undergraduate studying drawing and painting in the early 1980s, I’m struck by the fact that there were so many contradictions in what I learned. Most of my instructors came of age in the ‘50s with both feet planted firmly in the school of Abstract Expression!!!ism. The surface of the work was the only true reality, and any attempt at narrative or depiction seemed a hopelessly outmoded form of expression!!!. Yet concurrently, I was drawing from the figure nearly every day, attempting to master the very tradition they had forsworn. If this curriculum confused many students, I was certainly one of the bewildered. That mixed message I received always disturbed me, and all my work since then has been an attempt at reconciling two opposing philosophies.

I found what I hoped to be an answer many years ago with pure light. It lent itself readily to abstraction, yet allowed me to explore the realism with which I was always so comfortable. So I painted pure sunlight, at first streaming into my apartment, creating arbitrary geometric forms that I could render within a very naturalistic framework. I loved the play of realism versus abstraction within the same painting, for it allowed me a foot in both art historical camps. Soon objects began to creep into my empty room compositions. I reveled in depicting their textures and surfaces with oil paint, as much as any student of the still life. But I always tried to follow a self-imposed rule: would it make for an interesting abstraction if devoid of anything recognizable?

Despite any progress I felt I was making, there was an element lacking, and that element was a human one. I avoided painting the figure for what seemed a mountain of art history that stood in my way. “What more could I add to this?” I thought. But my work always contained, at its core, the idea of the transitory. What could be more fleeting than the lowering rays of the sun, a blossoming flower, or ripening fruit? It took me many years to grasp the simple fact that we, as human beings, are no different. Our time is so short, especially when viewed against the wide backdrop of history. Yet there is a spirit that animates us, just as real but intangible as sunlight itself. Accepting this has led me back to the figure.

My work still contains contradictions: a love of illusion and rendered textures that could easily be an end in and of itself. By this fact, my work may be considered sensual, but is equally concerned with matters of the spirit. It may be highly realistic, but realism for its own sake was never my goal. That sense of contradiction that was awakened in me as a student has never left. If anything, I’ve become more uncomfortably aware of the opposite poles that co-exist in all of us: the tactile and spiritual, sacred and profane, light and dark, the transitory and timeless. In that sense, my instructors succeeded.

Michael Zigmond - 2006

 

 

 

 

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