"The Beginning" by Eric Zener

I noticed that you're from California and your style of painting has a California-esque quality to it. Your work reminds me of the California surrealists in the 70's and 80's to a degree. Were you influenced by them or is there a regional influence in your style?

I suppose at some level what we see influences us, however I can't really place a particular artist or regional influence on my work. That being said I did grow up in southern California in the 70's and 80's; surfing and living with creative parents and artistic relatives. I can imagine the beach lifestyle, appreciation for water and the sense of an "endless summer" has left quite an imprint on me--and ultimately my work.

Your paintings are superb, extremely high quality, almost photographic. Should I attribute this to a kind of realism?

Thank you! Sure, I suppose "realism" is correct. In person they certainly are not photorealistic . . . although I do try to create a great sense of realism with the light, color and movement of the figure, they are "paintings"; full of imperfections and evidence of the human hand.

Your paintings involve beach settings, swimming pool settings, paintings of swimmers. Is this water motif intended and if so why do you paint water? What does it mean to you?

I could expand on this for hours, but in a nutshell water is a metaphor for a place of renewal and personal transformation--both literally and the ephemeral sense of escape we get when we plunge below the surface. I have never intended them to be "sporty" or "fun in the sun" type of images, but rather a reflection on the collective desire in all of us to retreat from the noise of the world.

You seem to be interested in reflections on water, water splashes, bubbles--is this a technical curiosity or something else? I would say this is the "surrealistic" aspect of your paintings, would you agree?

Perhaps "surreal" only in terms of the metaphor of the imagery. For example, for me, the bubbles represent memories: the past being released or let go. In the water, a sense of baptism occurs (symbolically of course), releasing our air is akin to letting go and moving into something new. For the splashes and diving boards they represent a type of portal to our youth, when life appeared softer and easier. The pool is a place to rekindle that carefree time--too often eroded by age.

Many of your figures are resting near the water or in water. Some seem to be in fact in between worlds--of life and death. Am I reading into things? What is the relationship between your figures and the water they inhabit?

Yes . . . between two worlds. Above the surface we appear "all together", below we are moving and in a constant state of transformation (symbolically). Things are not as they appear . . . This is particularly evident in the treading water series I have painted. I love how the figure struggling to stay afloat is so rigid and effortful, while the part below the surface is fluid, peaceful and in a state of constant change.

"Relinquishing" by Eric Zener

My first question is about your arrangements. How do you choose an arrangement of photos? Is there a narrative to each gallery? Do you have a narrative in mind for "Jammin with Ash"?

Each gallery on my site has photos shot from either different times and/or places. Each gallery does have a theme; it depends how each group of images I've selected moves me.

The photos shown together help the dynamic in each group. Each photo I think helps the other photo. I've tried to maintain a rhythm in each gallery, a visual rhythm, trying to convey visual poetry almost.

I love how you mix seascapes with urban settings with portrait. Different subject matter but it all fuses together so well. Can you expand on this dynamic and the unity your arrangements create?

All the different images create a dynamic that somehow makes each subject cohesive. It is intended, but it's not like I go out and try to find trees or oceans and food and friends. I happen to have my camera with me and document my life around me. I'm trying to provoke emotion through the selections and if you have responded to them I am stoked that you can feel it...

These photos seem to me works of art. Almost every one of them, I would say is "art". Are these pictures you take off the cuff? Or do you patiently wait for the right moment?

As a photographer timing is essential to the shot. Most of my photography is off the cuff, but sometimes I do wait for the moment, especially shooting people. I appreciate you considering my work art! I approach my photography as my art.

Ultimately, photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.

At first I couldn't situate the image in my mind. That is, I didn't know exactly what I was looking at. The grotesque musculature of the tree trunk seemed to conceal the tree itself. And then I noticed a little man sitting beside the tree on a bench and a garbage can about ten feet away. As I scrolled the bottom bar, I witnessed a seamless collection of photographs nothing like this one, but all of them strangely connected.

For the rest of the night I tried to understand what it was about David's photographs that stirred in me such a visceral, intense preoccupation. Looking at them, my heart raced, and soon I needed to contact the artist and tell him that his photographs were producing this response in me. I would have to write a review of them; there was no choice. For the review, I would need to sample his images; how else could I convey to my readers the mystery behind these photographs?

The next day I returned to the pictures and studied them more closely. I wouldn't hear from David for another two days. At this point, I remembered the book by Barthes that I had inherited from my mother. I started reading it.

The studium speaks of the interest which we show in a photograph, the desire to study and understand what the meanings are in a photograph, to explore the relationship between the meanings and our own subjectivities. (1)

Yes, I was interested in these images. What else could explain my "enthusiastic commitment" in Barthes's words? It was this interest that drew me back to David's website again and again.

The studium is a result of my volition, my will to study the photographs.

There was meaning in the photographs, but the sort of meaning you scooped up with your impressions and created yourself. There was no pre-existing meaning, only suggestions and possibilities, which made studying the images similar to looking at artifacts in a museum. You could play with the storyline of each object, invent the characters and their relationships, tease out the latent emotion of the scenes--

Lenbachhaus Kunstbau (Photo by yushimoto_02)

Art on the Net: Reclaiming Art for the Public

by Christina Wegman

What comes to mind when you think of art? Perhaps you picture a child learning to draw with crayon on flimsy paper and a doting mother claiming that her son is going to be an artistic genius because he knew to color the leaves green? Or maybe you imagine the stark white walls and well-directed lighting of an illustrious museum or gallery? What about an eccentric Bohemian type? A crackpot amateur who is hardly worthy of that museum or gallery?

What we may not consider is how the Internet challenges these stereotypes about art and artists. Take, for example, the fact that some people believe they are too far removed from the “art world.” This distance almost disappears when you consider that an art exhibit on the Web is only a click away.

Yet why does the distance between art and life exist in the first place? In his book, Art as Experience, the American philosopher John Dewey reasoned that while museums were established to protect masterpieces, these institutions also separated art from everyday life, thereby making the very concept of fine art seem rather intimidating to the majority of people. One can argue that a small group of “elites” still enjoys art museums and collecting art because of the prestige rather than any deep appreciation. Galleries and street festivals may be more accessible, yet the already-established fear of art can make galleries seem too aloof and street festivals too simplistic.

The museum and gallery experience has been a large part of my childhood and continues to shape my adulthood, to the point that I have even worked as an intern at a fine arts museum. While I was there, the curators were anything but arrogant and the artists, for the most part, humble and pleasant.

But why not expand our definition of art? Why do we relegate our experience of art to an hour and a half on a weekend, and then treat that experience as an ornament to our lives rather than an integral part of being human? Long before written history, humans used images to understand their surroundings. These images have served spiritual, educational or communication purposes. The ancient Greeks would have detested a world where art and other important areas of knowledge and experience were all so dreadfully compartmentalized and marginalized as they are today, and I am sure that I am not alone in wondering how to break from the sort of life in which art is external to my existence and not a functional part of the whole.

 Comparative Analogy II by Michael Cheval

One of the pleasures of writing art reviews is that the writer gets to enter the world of the artist’s creations. Obligingly, the reader follows as the writer gently leads her into another dimension, another continent of possibility. Perhaps no other living artist deserves a guide, a shaman, for his works than the Russian master, Michael Cheval.

I am no shaman; but I will lead.

I set out to write illustration art reviews for Escape into Life, but inevitably I stepped into a brier patch of fine art, notably Cheval’s. The instant I saw his work, I knew I had to write about it. The images had cast a spell on me . . .

There is magic in this artwork. Not only are the paintings populated with magical characters, court jesters, and magicians themselves, but a supernatural magic suffuses each painting like the flower juice Oberon orders Puck to drop into Titania’s eyes as she’s sleeping in Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Love-in-Idleness” is the name of the flower in the play. Likewise, Cheval’s artwork conjures visions of supernatural spheres, doorways into parallel realities, and glimpses into absurdist theaters.

Absurdity is Cheval’s main subject. But he creates his own definition of absurdity, which his paintings seek to reveal. To Cheval, absurdity is a “game of the imagination, where all ties are carefully chosen to construct a literary plot.” In addition, he says that absurdity is “an inverted side or reality, a reverse side of logic.”

Cheval’s works are grouped into themes; "Nature of Absurdity", "Eternity of Absurdity", "Illusions of Absurdity", "Reality of Absurdity", and "Sense of Absurdity".

The shape of a dress or a faucet will become another object, a surreal object, such as a table or a horn instrument; but it will retain the original shape of the dress or the faucet. Such are Cheval’s games of the imagination; we do not always know what we are looking at. The eye must adjust to the picture object-by-object as it simultaneously takes in a new chessboard of reality.

Despite the illogic pervading the works, there is a coherency of representation. The heightened realism reminiscent of 17th century Dutch art does just that--the precision knits our illusions together to such a degree that we see Cheval’s paintings as actualities playing out in another dimension.

There are so many delectable images on Cheval’s website, and a viewer can spend hours looking at them, lost in a labyrinth of dreams; but for the sake of review, I will talk about two of my favorites.