Marc Zimmerman "Homage to Rousseau" Oil Painting, Jungle Fantasy, Reclining Nude With Lion, Magenta Sofa, Contemporary Art West Coast

Details

Description

Rousseau spent his life dreaming jungles he had never visited into paintings of absolute conviction. Zimmerman honors that tradition here … Read more Rousseau spent his life dreaming jungles he had never visited into paintings of absolute conviction. Zimmerman honors that tradition here by doing exactly the same thing in his own language. A reclining nude on a blazing magenta sofa inhabits a jungle so lush and so layered that it seems to breathe. A lion settles nearby without menace, because in Zimmerman's exotic fantasy worlds the animals are never threatening. They are at home, and the figure is at home with them. Every botanical element carries the graphic clarity of a printmaker who learned early that a shape must earn its place in a composition. The palette is extraordinary, deep greens holding against the heat of the magenta, gold and orange flickering through the foliage like light through a canopy. This is one of the most significant paintings in the collection. It belongs on a wall that can support its ambition, a great room, a collector's living space, somewhere it can be seen from a distance and then discovered all over again up close.

Marc Zimmerman is an American painter and ceramic sculptor based in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. For more than four decades, his work has opened doors into imagined worlds: lush jungles filled with fantastical botanical forms, sun-drenched Mediterranean villages, vibrant florals, and ceramic totems that blend ancient influences with a distinctly contemporary vision. Zimmerman's artistic language was shaped by an unusually varied career. His background as a woodcut printmaker brought compositional clarity and strong graphic structure to his paintings, while the influence of Henri Rousseau and Paul Gauguin inspired his richly imagined landscapes. Time spent living and painting in Kauai, along with extensive travel throughout Mexico and Europe, infused his work with the saturated light, color, and atmosphere that define his celebrated Jungle, Village, and Tropical Floral series.

In recent years, Zimmerman returned to his earliest passion, clay, creating his Garden Totem series from hand-sculpted and individually glazed ceramic elements stacked into spontaneous vertical compositions. Rooted in his pottery experience in Venice Beach during the 1960s and 70s, these works bring the same exuberance, movement, and inventive use of color found throughout his paintings into three-dimensional form. His work is represented by galleries in California, Florida, and New York, and is held in private collections throughout the United States and internationally. See less