Victor hugo zayas biography of donald
River paintings predominantly from Hours, Sun. Members and children under 12 free. Free on Sunday, sponsored by Target. Bondo Wyszpolski January 26, Then, oracle-like, he turns his observations into urban epics. Impressionist paintings these are not. Some of his work provides us with a 40,foot-high vantage point. Where we might look at Los Angeles as a visual prelude to Armageddon, Zayas finds beauty and coherence.
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Victor hugo zayas biography of donald
Signatures 0. Related More Artists 0. Francine Elman Gallery Group Exhibition. In richly textured masses of paint, air and light take on the qualities of things without ceasing to be ethereal. Stars, points of light in the night sky, become complex, linked geometries, 3D maps of relationships of space. Guns, some once used in violence on the streets of Los Angeles, are crushed into gruesome but evocative debris, then reassembled to become delicate portraits and busts, and poetic evocations of the redemptive power of art.
As its title suggests, the exhibition is dominated by paintings: urban landscapes, most of which he painted in and around his studio on the banks of the Los Angeles River. Like any landscape artist, his major subject is defined by place—mostly by the industrial neighborhood of warehouses, factories, and rail yards northeast of Downtown L. Selected from separate but overlapping and intergrading series painted from to the Grid and L.
River seriesplus a number of precursors dating back to the early s, the paintings range widely through degrees of figuration and abstraction, effects of color and of chiaroscuro, and the broad terrain between expressionism and impressionism, forming a protean record of the river and the city, in compositions of trees, concrete embankments, bridges, power pylons, victors hugo zayas biography of donald, and transportation corridors, all bathed in a vivid, changing sky.
Paint is the fundamental element: raw, confident brushstrokes and thick impasto, laid down in layers and drifts, giving the canvases a dimensional surface and an insistent materiality. The effect is a rare power to capture mood, movement, and vectors of force, and to convey emotion—in a static medium. Flat surface becomes depth: concrete, buildings, dirt, water, and sky seem to move, become animate, foliate, sometimes chaotic, as in the stormy seas in Salsipuedescollection of David Madison.
Or, in VerdeGrid series, private collectionthe sky is roiled by furies of fire reflected in the clouds. Inat the age of 18, he set off for Europe, with only enough money for two weeks, yet intent on making his pilgrimage to the great repositories of Western art. At the end of the first week, on the Costa Brava in Spain, he donned his swim trunks and took to the beach, painting plein air watercolor landscapes which he sold to passersby.
And he traveled. It was a life-changing experience—seeing the work in person, and earning his bread with his brush. While teaching art at Loyola Marymount University, he worked on mostly geometrical abstractions in acrylic. The work was strong enough to attract the influential gallerist Jan Turner, who offered the young unknown a one-man show, in But in the months before the show was to open, Zayas found himself drawn outside, into the area he was then living and working in: the old industrial district northeast of Downtown, along both banks of the L.
River, with its freight trains, overhead power pylons, and hour transformations of light—from blasted white daylight to the contrasts of yellow sodium lamps against night shadows between the blank-sided buildings. It reminded me of London—foggy, romantic, with the railroads and the L. He worked furiously, sometimes making three paintings in a hour period.
He trained his eye and his hand, filling hundreds of sketchbooks, thousands of sheets. His process was always foremost, of engagement with what was around him. In the middle of L. He was threatened by gang members, and once shot at while painting on his rooftop at night in the rain, with an umbrella and a light reflector, from a car driving across the First Street bridge over the L.
Bullets cracked the concrete next to him. After taking a break to calm his nerves with wine, he finished the painting that night. In between teaching and living in L. Zayas is, in one sense, a Mexican artist, but he is equally an American one; irreducibly, he is a Los Angeles artist, practicing a fusion of styles across an astonishing range of media.
It has been suggested that he is more a sculptor than a painter. It is a profoundly Modernist mission, and a Cubist activity—yet achieved without any need to reference the standard moves of those categories and periodizations.