Marc Zimmerman "Live and Let Live" Glazed Ceramic Totem, 62 Inches Tall, Green and Red Glaze, Mixed Organic Forms, Contemporary Art West Coast

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The title carries Zimmerman's philosophy of making as well as any phrase could. Each element in this totem has its … Read more The title carries Zimmerman's philosophy of making as well as any phrase could. Each element in this totem has its own scale and character and glaze: a fish here, an organic form there, a textured sphere below, each one different from its neighbors and each one making its neighbors more interesting by contrast. The green and red pairing is warm and lively without being obvious, and the variety of forms gives the column a rhythm that reveals itself on repeated viewing. This is the improvisational spirit of Zimmerman's totem practice expressed with complete ease: an object that feels playful and resolved simultaneously, the product of an artist who has spent enough time in the studio to know when something is finished.

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