Biography
Zedekiah P. Schild
Artist’s Statement:
Henri Frédéric Amiel wrote that, “Any landscape is a condition of the spirit.” This immediately suggests to me the notion that, perhaps, the converse is also true. Any condition of the spirit can be reflected as a landscape. These conditional landscapes are the guts of my paintings.
My subject matter is simple. It is hewn directly from emotional memory and the things I encounter in my community. The patterns, textures, and rhythms that I pursue grow from my day-to-day work as a carpenter in San Francisco, California and my identity as a working class artist in America.
Endeavoring to maintain simplicity of line and unashamed naïveté, I work from a deconstructed process, often absorbing a subject by casually conversing with a friend in the studio while I paint, or, working obliquely from the memories of a place, a gesture or a phrase. My paintings are reflections of my inner landscapes and the city around me; sometimes figurative, sometimes non-representative, the subject’s physicality is manifested as an expression of my instinctual reactions. I seek out animistic imagery to inhabit these landscapes, places where impasto brushstrokes become guileless, direct routes to an image. I embrace the clash of the mundane and the extravagant, and try not to apologize for it. I feel like the sublime hovers in an illusive space somewhere in the middle.
My work as a carpenter directly fuels my painting and I see myself as part of a working class, “outsider” American Art tradition. It is my goal to preserve the rough and salty edges of something created as an end unto itself but without forgetting that the piece will interact with viewers. I hope to make something pure, but not precious.
