A combination of practice, learning, and spirituality is what allows my perspective as an artist to remain traditional yet contemporary. My goal is simply to produce meaningful art to spark your imagination and make your world unique.

Zina’s work has an emotional symbolism that is at once personal and universal. Favorite things hide beneath layers, old tricycles evoke a child’s progress toward independence, chairs, and sofas have human personalities like soft feminine or strong masculine, and bicycles embrace the joy of the ride and environmental wisdom. Watercolor painting has been a special joy for Zina for many years. Its transparency, light effects, and its possibilities for tight or loose rendering are inspirational for the artist.

My drive to paint is innate. I simply must paint. I am inspired by my writings, music, and life! I want to keep pushing the boundaries to find out what is there. I am inspired that through what I do, I may enable another person to open their mind, to remove the blinders, and reach their possibilities. I strive to create work that moves others and myself. In the end, I believe in staying true to what inspires me and allowing myself to open my soul and dive into the canvas.

My love of painting is also very much connected to my love of design, architecture, and music. Ever since I was a child, I have been drawn to color, balance, shape, and especially to texture and form. I use these things to find unpredictable harmony and balance.

The paintings create a portal for the viewer to go through what I went through first. Each piece encompasses the complexities of human emotion presented and contained within the composition.

My job as an artist is to excavate mystery. The mystery is that which cannot be explained, the alchemy beyond technique and preconceived modern imagery.

Presently, I am using paint, chalk, putty, oil, and pastels on wood panels finished with art resin. I paint layers on layers to create and unify other dissimilar elements that might otherwise not stand alone.

The best compliment an artist can receive is when viewers resonate with the artist’s creation. The resonance becomes the goal: To express ideas, thoughts, and emotions using paint and mixed media materials in a way that transcends literal images and creates a bridge between contemporary impressionism and abstraction.

Artworks become visual reflections of abstract ideas stemming from a place of the familiar—a favorite landmark, a natural phenomenon, an important issue, venue, or experience.

Bold, raw brush strokes; sponge blending and erasing; use of palette instruments; and soft wet-on-wet color combinations mark the simultaneous vibrancy and tranquility drawn from the inspiration of the natural world.

A familiar landscape is viewed differently when resonance occurs between the artist’s creation and the viewer’s experience.

My artist’s statement is about improvising with interesting textures, colors, written messages, or random texts in found objects all around in daily routine.
Some old weathered pieces of material may help even choose the subject of my new art piece, it often comes spontaneously, and I start making a preliminary layout without even knowing close to the final result. My best works came all out of improvisation, while suddenly some sets of different patterns, paintings, and backgrounds blend perfectly together, and people can find some familiarity and only their personal qualities and meanings in the same composition.

I like this:
“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” ~ English Proverb

Texas can be hot in the summer time and this summer is no exception. Especially west Texas but the plus side of that is it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth. It’s a massive open space with a sky as far as you can see. Love West Texas and Big Bend National Park.

I enjoy all types of subjects for my photography–travel, landscape, nature, street scenes, people, architecture, abstracts, and digital art. My hope is to share the beauty and wonders of the world artistically and creatively.

It seems just a few years ago. That boy walking along the banks of the creek on the edge of his grandpa’s property starts digging bare toes into the mud at the edge of the water when he stops to check how cold the water is. As he watches the snails make trails in the underwater mud, he is thinking of how excited his friends will be with the arrowhead he just found beside the trail to the creek crossing. He is wondering how long ago did the Indians lose it there. As he meanders slowly back home before supper, thousands of questions beginning with “why,” rolled around in his head, waiting for answers.

Stretching your mind ahead 60 + years, many of those thousands of questions along with many, many more that materialized through those years have finally found answers. Many venues, from classrooms, conferences, instructors, workshops, knowledgeable individuals, historians, and masters of art in various fields, have answered all of the “whys”. Now I am in the “Make It Happen Stage” of my life. What you are witnessing is a culmination of clay hand-building and firing techniques from a couple of thousand years ago, mixed with a lot of finesse, to produce some amazing artwork.

Who knew the same clay that little boy wiggled his toes through many years ago in a creek in central North Carolina, would be a lifelong interest to him as he moved through life? I still own a piece of that creek and still dig clay there to make some of my pottery and the water-based colors I use to paint on canvases as well as my southwest-designed pottery.

My wish is that you will enjoy my artwork as much as I do.

As an artist, I find inspiration in fragments of nature held close for reflection. I employ a personal vocabulary of fluid marks and organic imagery to express the ephemeral quality of the natural world. Within this realm, my work varies from representational interplay between painting and drawing to flora and fauna and botanical interplay.

I tend to work in series in the exploration and development of a particular image. My subject matter includes botany fauna relationships and the impact human actions have on nature. Through attention to detail, I strive to communicate nature’s continuous beauty to viewers. My goal is to construct a sense of awe that nature presents and evokes the same emotion through my artwork.

In my paintings, flowers have become more 3D-like in plant architecture. The structure is made visible, and the flower petals that are stretched over the ribs or veins that give them their structure come to life. There is tension and freshness of a plant bursting with life in contrast to the wilting and desiccation of individual parts of a flower. The cycle of birth, destruction, and rebirth is intertwined as an essential part of the forces of nature.