Artist Profile: Jim Zasoski
by Steve Downing
Jim Zasoski spent his formative years in Bigfork, MN, where his focus was on the outdoors and Boy Scouts and baseball. Mimicking his dad’s work-related sketches and diagrams, he did some drawing early on and was told he was good at it, but he never thought of himself as an artist.
Today his paintings sell at high four-figure prices. He’s represented almost exclusively now by the prestigious Ann Nathan Gallery in Chicago. But Jim spends as much time in the out-of-doors as he ever did, both at his cabin in the woods just south of where he grew up and at his home and studio on rural acreage southeast of Grand Rapids, on the Mississippi River.
It’s been a circuitous and not always fully intentional journey. Jim’s family moved to Grand Rapids when he was in high school. His first formal art class was with Nora Stevens, and by the time he graduated he was committed to the visual arts. Over the next several years he studied at the University of North Dakota, Moorhead State University, Itasca Community College, University of Minnesota in Duluth, and Bemidji State University-where he received his B.A. degree---and finally the University of Oregon, for his M.A.
Then he became a shoemaker. He worked at the Itascan Boot Shop in Grand Rapids for ten years, making moccasins and other custom-fitted footwear during the day. At night he painted. He slept standing up.
By then he and his wife Denise (nee Riehle) were parents. They have four children, and now four grandchildren. Familial responsibility has been as life-defining for Jim as his art, each role impacting the other.
For more than a decade in the 80s and 90s, the Leighton Gallery in Blue Hill, Maine, was the primary Zasoski outlet, and his work is in private collections and museums up and down the northeast coast. Once a year, Jim would personally deliver a new trailer-load of oil paintings to Judith Leighton. Sometimes it became a family road-trip, involving camping, stops at the Baseball Hall of Fame and other attractions along the way. Some years the trailer brought home work that simply wasn’t selling.
Has it always been comfortable? Comforting?
Look at almost any Zasoski painting, from the early cloud- and land-scapes through the circus-themed series to the latest female figures in idiosyncratic settings, and ‘comfort’ will not come to mind.
That has something to do with Jim’s painterly influences: Marsden Hartley’s expressionist-realist landscapes, with their palpable heavy potential; Edward Hopper’s realistic portrayals of loneliness, isolation and regret, rendered under moody lighting in saturated color. Or: the surrealist Rene Magritte (a picture of a picture differentiated from its background only by the easel) and the metaphysical Giorgio de Chirico (a tower where towers don’t happen); both artists applied realist technique and training to purposefully improbable, often absurd juxtapositions of content.
So it is with a Zasoski painting. The question is never what’s in the picture. His representational skill is flat-out exceptional, photographic when he wants it to be. In the recent “Tabletop Collection”, from the Monopolis Series, the canvas is dominated by a woman’s face, meticulously nuanced, as she contemplates a baseball, a bobber, an ocean liner, and the sculpture of a boxer, among other objects. The scale offers zero context. The bobber is as big as the ship.
Ask Jim what’s going on there, and he’ll think out loud for awhile about how to ignite a visual idea with a single word or phrase. How to deconstruct a particular two-dimensional surface. How to deploy a willingness to just see what happens, by way of paint, edges, light source, hunch, illusion. You wonder where the organizing principle is in a picture like “Tabletop Collection”. The question doesn’t interest Jim, though it doesn’t offend him either. He’ll remind you that the final, crucial requirement is viewer participation, and he’ll never be able to help anybody with that.
A ‘working life’ in the arts, in the humanities, is frequently an oxymoron. In today’s unraveled economies, art markets are quiet. So Jim’s doing now what he’s always done when that happens: something else. In the daylight hours, he’s currently employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture/Forest Service, conducting research on the northland’s soil, water and trees, in the lead-up to big-picture strategies for recovery and sustainability. At night he paints.
For samples of Jim Zasoski’s latest work, go to the Ann Nathan Gallery website. The list of artists is alphabetical, so keep scrolling. Jim will also have an exhibit at the Myles Reif Performing Arts Center this fall, mid-October through November. Watch for information about that, coming soon.
Jim Zasoski spent his formative years in Bigfork, MN, where his focus was on the outdoors and Boy Scouts and baseball. Mimicking his dad’s work-related sketches and diagrams, he did some drawing early on and was told he was good at it, but he never thought of himself as an artist.
Today his paintings sell at high four-figure prices. He’s represented almost exclusively now by the prestigious Ann Nathan Gallery in Chicago. But Jim spends as much time in the out-of-doors as he ever did, both at his cabin in the woods just south of where he grew up and at his home and studio on rural acreage southeast of Grand Rapids, on the Mississippi River.
It’s been a circuitous and not always fully intentional journey. Jim’s family moved to Grand Rapids when he was in high school. His first formal art class was with Nora Stevens, and by the time he graduated he was committed to the visual arts. Over the next several years he studied at the University of North Dakota, Moorhead State University, Itasca Community College, University of Minnesota in Duluth, and Bemidji State University-where he received his B.A. degree---and finally the University of Oregon, for his M.A.
Then he became a shoemaker. He worked at the Itascan Boot Shop in Grand Rapids for ten years, making moccasins and other custom-fitted footwear during the day. At night he painted. He slept standing up.
By then he and his wife Denise (nee Riehle) were parents. They have four children, and now four grandchildren. Familial responsibility has been as life-defining for Jim as his art, each role impacting the other.For more than a decade in the 80s and 90s, the Leighton Gallery in Blue Hill, Maine, was the primary Zasoski outlet, and his work is in private collections and museums up and down the northeast coast. Once a year, Jim would personally deliver a new trailer-load of oil paintings to Judith Leighton. Sometimes it became a family road-trip, involving camping, stops at the Baseball Hall of Fame and other attractions along the way. Some years the trailer brought home work that simply wasn’t selling.
Has it always been comfortable? Comforting?
Look at almost any Zasoski painting, from the early cloud- and land-scapes through the circus-themed series to the latest female figures in idiosyncratic settings, and ‘comfort’ will not come to mind.
That has something to do with Jim’s painterly influences: Marsden Hartley’s expressionist-realist landscapes, with their palpable heavy potential; Edward Hopper’s realistic portrayals of loneliness, isolation and regret, rendered under moody lighting in saturated color. Or: the surrealist Rene Magritte (a picture of a picture differentiated from its background only by the easel) and the metaphysical Giorgio de Chirico (a tower where towers don’t happen); both artists applied realist technique and training to purposefully improbable, often absurd juxtapositions of content.
So it is with a Zasoski painting. The question is never what’s in the picture. His representational skill is flat-out exceptional, photographic when he wants it to be. In the recent “Tabletop Collection”, from the Monopolis Series, the canvas is dominated by a woman’s face, meticulously nuanced, as she contemplates a baseball, a bobber, an ocean liner, and the sculpture of a boxer, among other objects. The scale offers zero context. The bobber is as big as the ship.
Ask Jim what’s going on there, and he’ll think out loud for awhile about how to ignite a visual idea with a single word or phrase. How to deconstruct a particular two-dimensional surface. How to deploy a willingness to just see what happens, by way of paint, edges, light source, hunch, illusion. You wonder where the organizing principle is in a picture like “Tabletop Collection”. The question doesn’t interest Jim, though it doesn’t offend him either. He’ll remind you that the final, crucial requirement is viewer participation, and he’ll never be able to help anybody with that.
A ‘working life’ in the arts, in the humanities, is frequently an oxymoron. In today’s unraveled economies, art markets are quiet. So Jim’s doing now what he’s always done when that happens: something else. In the daylight hours, he’s currently employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture/Forest Service, conducting research on the northland’s soil, water and trees, in the lead-up to big-picture strategies for recovery and sustainability. At night he paints.
For samples of Jim Zasoski’s latest work, go to the Ann Nathan Gallery website. The list of artists is alphabetical, so keep scrolling. Jim will also have an exhibit at the Myles Reif Performing Arts Center this fall, mid-October through November. Watch for information about that, coming soon.
posted by Katie Carter at
11:47 AM
<< Home