Marc Zimmerman "Associates in Teal" Glazed Ceramic Totem, 65 Inches Tall, Teal and Gold Glaze, Fish and Face Elements, Contemporary Art West Coast

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In this totem Zimmerman gives himself over to a single dominant color and explores it across the full range of … Read more In this totem Zimmerman gives himself over to a single dominant color and explores it across the full range of a sixty-five inch column. The teal glazes shift from near-green to near-blue across the surfaces of the stacked elements, demonstrating that a single color contains its own variety when handled by an artist who understands color at depth. Fish forms and face elements provide the compositional narrative, the recurring characters of Zimmerman's totem vocabulary given their most tonally unified setting. Gold accents at intervals bring warmth to the cool dominant. This is a particularly strong garden sculpture: the teal will hold beautifully against planting, reading as cool and distinctive in all light conditions and through all seasons.

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