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Kathleen Zwizanski – Biography

A native of Southern New Jersey, Kathleen Zwizanski received formal painting education at The School of Visual Art and Design, Philadelphia from 1966 to 1970. The faculty of which was made up of a number of painters who themselves were students of a number of renown abstract expressions painters of the 1940’s and 1950’s.

Trained in the abstract expressionist school Kathleen Zwizanski works in oil paint and has always been interested in the visual impact of painting over the need for realism.

She travels annually to Italy. A pilgrimage that started in 2004 and involves time in multiple regions; among which include Sicily, Abruzzo, Umbria, and Tuscany. As she has physically explored the Italian landscape her current body of work took shape. The work is concerned with the structure of the landscape and is linked to the tradition of plein air painting in regards to establishing chiaroscuro and atmospheric perspective but also references ideas from Abstract Expressionism.

Recently, due mainly to the Abstract Expressionist influence of her art education, she has started to explore a more abstract approach which continues to be influenced by her Italian landscape experience.

She spends extended periods each year based primarily in the Molise and Umbria regions of Italy with her husband, while maintaining a permanent residence in Lambertville, New Jersey.

Kathleen Zwizanski has presented in numerous shows in the Upper Bucks region, and in November she just completed a successful one-man show at the Delaware River Town Chamber of Commerce Gallery in Lambertville New Jersey. Her work is contained in various private collections in the United States, Sweden, and Italy.

Kathleen Zwizanski – Artist Statement

Kathleen Zwizanski’s approach to painting is one that is without pretense and intellectualism. “Once a painting is completed it exists on its own and communicates to the viewer solely through the eyes without conscious thought or context.” She considers intellectual conversations about a visual medium such as painting to be an example of “too much thinking and not enough seeing.”

Unlike other Abstract-Expressionists, Kathleen Zwizanski has not concentrated on establishing and working within a differentiated and immediately identifiable personal style, and her work does not appear to be, nor aspires to be “new”. However, in her recent work there is a move towards a more formally compressed, single statement. Kathleen Zwizanski’s European/Italian cosmopolitanism has provided excessive possibilities as seen in the authority of her recent works.

With regard to her recent abstract painting, it is clear that, despite the look of being spontaneous almost to the point of caprice, all thoughts of romantic frenzy or emotion must be removed when one takes into account her manipulation of paint. Her work is, in a way, a kind of laboratory of the painterly, an exploration of painterly range, a catalogue of what paint can attain. Her abstract automatism has more to do with intuition and accident than with the search for subconscious direction, and her spontaneity and accident are as inherently controllable as any other painting technique. She associates color with light. Her own words are precise in this regard: “in nature, light creates the color; in the painting, color creates the light.”