Marc Zimmerman "Hill Town" Oil on Canvas, Large Village Landscape With Palm Tree in Lilac, Carmel California Art, Original 39 X 31 Inches, 2024

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A twisting blue tree leans across the canvas while a tall, fringed palm in dark green rises beside it, and … Read more A twisting blue tree leans across the canvas while a tall, fringed palm in dark green rises beside it, and between them a town of yellow, pink, aqua and lilac houses climbs toward a maroon mountain. Crimson flowers with dark centers open in the foreground, and sage-green rosettes and a striped leaf fill the gaps. Small doors and windows in aqua and rust punctuate the walls. The lower third is a plain, drippy field of rust and moss brown, which gives the busy scenery above a place to rest. The sky is swept in soft lilac and pink, and every plant and house keeps its own bold outline.

At roughly three by three and a half feet it suits a hall, a bedroom or a dining room where a smaller piece would feel lost. The lilac, rust and teal go with walnut, plaster, linen and dark metal, and sit especially well on a warm beige or soft cream wall. Over a sideboard or a slim console with ceramics and a tall vase, it pulls a room's earth tones together.

Oil on canvas, 39 x 31 x 1.5 in (99.1 x 78.7 x 3.8 cm).

Marc Zimmerman paints in oil on stretched canvas, building his scenes from flat, clearly outlined shapes of saturated color. Years of woodcut printmaking gave him crisp edges, simplified forms and a feeling for texture, while Henri Rousseau and Paul Gauguin shaped his lush botanical worlds, and painting trips to Kauai fed his Jungle series. Self-taught in oil since 1989, he lets a harmony of related colors carry each composition, then adds one unexpected accent.

Marc Zimmerman is a painter and ceramic sculptor based in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. He began as a potter, working at the Pot Shop, a studio pottery in Venice Beach, from the mid-1960s, then studied watercolor in Southern California and woodcut printing in Santa Barbara before teaching himself oil painting in 1989.

He ran his own painting gallery in Carmel from 1997 to 2002 and was given a retrospective of his oils at the Pacific Grove Art Center in 2012. His Jungle series grew from painting trips to Kauai, with Rousseau and Gauguin as early guides. After forty years of painting he returned to clay with his Garden Totems, hand-built, stacked and glazed one element at a time, often without a sketch. See less