FFWD Weekly
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A Plethora of Zuck
Ontario artist's tranquil distilled images featured in three Calgary exhibits
Recent Work at Paul Kuhn Gallery
A Decade of Painting and Still Life In the Landscape at the Nickle Gallery
by Mark WaltonFor his latest works Tim Zuck carefully collected stones on a Newfoundland beach.
It's how he makes art: something fascinates him, he mulls it over in his head and then pares it down on paper and canvas into a perfectly balanced composition.
There's no hidden agenda - no political or social message. He takes the same approach if it's a nude man or woman, arrangement of wooden blocks or bird's-eye view of the BC coast.
Currently, over 60 oil paintings and charcoal drawings by the 50-year-old artist are on display in Calgary. The Newfoundland stones are at the Paul Kuhn Gallery along with another recent series of an airplane wing seen through the plane's window. At the Nickle, meantime, there's a set of paintings courtesy of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and a group of drawings assembled by the MacLaren Art Centre.
Right now Zuck is something of a celebrity. Recently he was interviewed in the prestigious arts publication Border Crossings, and next summer his two exhibits at the Nickle will be showcased at Canada's embassy in Japan.
Zuck's life story rivals that of Forrest Gump. He presently lives in Wyebridge, Ontario but was born in Erie, Pennsylvania. His father, a Quaker and pacifist, quit his engineering job at GM because the corporation was developing tanks for the military. The family then moved to Texas where Zuck witnessed the brutality of racial segregation.
In his teens and 20s, Zuck was extremely active in the anti-war movement. He also spent a year at university in Madras, India.
Zuck attended the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design when several notorious artists taught there, and he recalls getting "blasted" one night with Joseph Beuys, the granddaddy of performance art.
At that time, experimental art practises were all the rage and Zuck relates that during seven years of university he didn't take a single drawing class. Nonetheless, he learned to draw and paint on his own, and since 1979 has been a full-time artist and served as an arts administrator and educator.
One of the pieces at the Nickle - a simplistic human silhouette - represents an early attempt at "image" painting. But these exhibits are not meant to be a historical overview, and, in fact, Zuck and assistant curator Christine Sowiak cleverly mixed them both together. It allows us to make a connection between, for example, Zuck's finely-crafted drawing of the hip bone and pubic thatch of a reclining nude and the fluid sensuous folds and contours of a seamlessly painted prairie landscape.
Not all of Zuck's attempts to distill form are successful, however. At Paul Kuhn, the drawings definitely upstage the paintings. His neutral-toned picture of an airplane wing, for instance, seems a trifle stilted and fails to capture the moment when Zuck glanced out the window and found himself magically suspended in time and space.
Sometimes it's a case of less actually being less. The earlier still lifes depicting rectangular blocks, shadow and drapery clearly have more to offer than a later version which shows a solitary block plunked down in center frame.
Nevertheless, the tastefully arranged objects and intimate niches of landscape and the human body that Tim Zuck has reduced to a familiar geometry, provide a generous harmonious space we can enter and enjoy.
Or, as the artist puts it: "I see a painting as a gateway, as a door, a little opening or - to use Star Trek terminology - a split in the universe."
"I'm not sure what they are or what they mean. 'Metaphor' is not quite the right word. But when I was a little kid I used to go to a private spot in the woods where I was overcome with a sense of tranquillity, of connectedness. These works kind of remind me of that."
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