Eric Zener (born 1966,

Astoria, Oregon Astoria is a Port, port city in and the county seat of Clatsop County, Oregon, United States. Founded in 1811, Astoria is the oldest city in the state and was the first permanent American settlement west of the Rocky Mountains. The county is the ...

) is an American

photorealist Photorealism is a genre of art that encompasses painting, drawing and other graphic media, in which an artist studies a photograph and then attempts to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another Medium (arts), medium. Although ...

artist best known for

figure painting A figure painting is a work of fine art in any of the Painting#Painting media, painting media with the primary subject being the human figure, whether clothed or Nude (art), nude. Figure painting may also refer to the activity of creating such ...

s of lone subjects, often in or about

swimming pool A swimming pool, swimming bath, wading pool, paddling pool, or simply pool, is a structure designed to hold water to enable Human swimming, swimming and associated activities. Pools can be built into the ground (in-ground pools) or built abo ...

Biography

Zener was born in 1966 in Astoria, Oregon, to a

psychologist A psychologist is a professional who practices psychology and studies mental states, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior. Their work often involves the experimentation, observation, and explanation, interpretatio ...

father and a

violin The violin, sometimes referred to as a fiddle, is a wooden chordophone, and is the smallest, and thus highest-pitched instrument (soprano) in regular use in the violin family. Smaller violin-type instruments exist, including the violino picc ...

ist mother who played for the

San Francisco Symphony The San Francisco Symphony, founded in 1911, is an American orchestra based in San Francisco, California. Since 1980 the orchestra has been resident at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in the city's Hayes Valley, San Francisco, Hayes Valley ne ...

. He grew up in the seaside community of

Encinitas, California Encinitas ( Spanish for "Small Oaks") is a beach city in the North County area of San Diego County, California, United States. Located in Southern California, it is approximately north of San Diego, between Solana Beach and Carlsbad, and a ...

. In 1991 he settled in San Francisco, where he was still living as of 2004. Zener has three children, the first born in approximately 1998, the second in approximately 2002, and the 3rd in 2009. He paints mostly out of a studio in Sausalito.

Career

Zener's works have been exhibited and sold throughout the United States, and internationally, and are part of a number of prominent private and corporate art collections. In April 2014, Zener became the second artist-in-residence of the

Quin Arts The Quin is a luxury hotel in New York City. It is located on 57th Street and Sixth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, two blocks south of Central Park. The Quin was originally the Buckingham Hotel, a Beaux-Arts style building designed by American a ...

Program at the Quin Hotel in

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

. His collection at the Quin included a large format

oil painting Oil painting is a painting method involving the procedure of painting with pigments combined with a drying oil as the Binder (material), binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on canvas, wood panel, or oil on coppe ...

and 11

resins A resin is a solid or highly viscous liquid that can be converted into a polymer. Resins may be biological or synthetic in origin, but are typically harvested from plants. Resins are mixtures of organic compounds, predominantly terpenes. Comm ...

of his most iconic pieces as well as new work from his annual solo show at Gallery Henoch in Chelsea for the Quin’s video art wall.

Painting style and influences

Zener is a

self-taught Autodidacticism (also autodidactism) or self-education (also self-learning, self-study and self-teaching) is the practice of education without the guidance of schoolmasters (i.e., teachers, professors, institutions). Overview Autodi ...

artist. As of 2004 he had created more than 600 works. His paintings, mostly in

oil An oil is any nonpolar chemical substance that is composed primarily of hydrocarbons and is hydrophobic (does not mix with water) and lipophilic (mixes with other oils). Oils are usually flammable and surface active. Most oils are unsaturate ...

, are in a photorealist or "super-realist" style Zener describes as "Contemporary Renaissance".

Water paintings

In 2003, while living in the

Costa Brava The Costa Brava (; ; "Wild Coast" or "Rough Coast") is a coastal region of Catalonia in northeastern Spain. Sources differ on the exact definition of the Costa Brava. Usually it can be regarded as stretching from the town of Blanes, northeas ...

region of

Spain Spain, or the Kingdom of Spain, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe with territories in North Africa. Featuring the Punta de Tarifa, southernmost point of continental Europe, it is the largest country in Southern Eur ...

, Zener became interested in watching bathers, and began a series of paintings of water, and of people interacting with water. Many paintings from this period depict women swimming underwater amidst air bubbles, or diving into the water, and have been described as reminiscent of

Hudson River School The Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by Romanticism. Early on, the paintings typically depicted the Hudson River Valley and the sur ...

and Barbizon School painters. For a second, more "experimental" series of water images, Zener painted over photographic transparencies that had been mounted on a wooden box covered with silver leaf, then covered with

resin A resin is a solid or highly viscous liquid that can be converted into a polymer. Resins may be biological or synthetic in origin, but are typically harvested from plants. Resins are mixtures of organic compounds, predominantly terpenes. Commo ...

. Other subjects for Zener have included beach scenes, and businessmen in various unexpected settings, such as by swimming pools or on tightropes.

References

External links

ericzener.com
- official artist site

- page on

artnet Artnet.com is an art market website. It is operated by Artnet Worldwide Corporation, which has headquarters in New York City. It is owned by Artnet AG, a German publicly-traded company based in Berlin that is listed on the Frankfurt Stock Ex ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Zener, Eric People from Astoria, Oregon People from Encinitas, California 1966 births Living people University of California, Santa Barbara alumni