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Alex Zwarenstein
RazzMatazz
2002
Oil on canvas
42 x 28 inches |
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 ealist painter Alex Zwarenstein is famous for painting the structural architecture of New York City and the characters that people it. Zwarenstein works in various mediums including oil, gouache and watercolor and his palette is vibrantly punctuated with contrasting surfaces of opaqueness and translucency.
Zwarenstein was born in 1952 in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). At the age of 17, he left Africa for London, England. Zwarenstein spent the next 13 years studying art at the Royal Academy of Art in London where he received a Masters Degree in painting and was a recipient of several awards including a William Turner Traveling Scholarship.
Zwarenstein's professional experience includes working as an instructor of painting in London, England at the Harrow College of Art, and in New York City at the Fashion Institute of Technology, the National Academy of Design and the Art Students' League. For several years Zwarenstein also worked as a cover illustrator for publications such as Forbes Magazine and the National Review before having his first solo exhibition in 1998 at the Eleanor Ettinger Gallery in New York City. Since then he has exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, Africa and Asia.
Alex Zwarenstein's work is among the collections of the Museum of the City of New York, the National Art Gallery of Zimbabwe, the New York Stock Exchange and the London City Council to name a few.
Art Interview: Did you intend to become a professional artist when you were young?
Alex Zwarenstein: It was like this. I have always painted and drawn, since I was a kid. Then when I was perhaps 12 years old, or a bit younger even, I went to a local art school in my hometown, where I could draw from models; but I never actually made a decision whether I wanted to be an artist, I simply grew into it.
Art Interview: Were your parents supportive of your artistic abilities?
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Alex Zwarenstein
Facade: Chandalier and Shadows
2005
Oil on panel
36 x 24 inches |
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Alex Zwarenstein: They were supportive. Like me, they just assumed from the beginning that I was going to be a painter. There wasn't any anguish about it. It was just something that I could do, enjoyed doing and was encouraged to do.
Art Interview: Didn't your parents fear that you wouldn't be able to succeed financially as an artist?
Alex Zwarenstein: I think that they were fairly naive about it, to be frank. You know, they saw what my abilities were. They assumed that if you were good at something, you would succeed in it. They were very supportive but not to the extent that they pushed me, because I didn't need pushing.
Art Interview: What did your parents do for a living?
Alex Zwarenstein: I was brought up in colonial Africa. For most of my life my father was what was called a 'green grocer'. He had a retail vegetable store. My mother was a retired lawyer but would often do legal work because being a grocer is a tough way to earn a living. My father eventually went out of business because supermarkets were coming into fashion. So then he went into retail liquor sales...beer and wine and so forth.
Art Interview: Were you living in South Africa?
Alex Zwarenstein: No, we were living in a town called Bulawayo, which at the time was in Rhodesia, just north of South Africa; now Rhodesia is called Zimbabwe.
Art Interview: How did you manage to go from there to New York?
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Alex Zwarenstein
Figure amongst colored paper
1973
48 x 72 inches |
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Alex Zwarenstein: First in 1971, when I was 17, I went to England to study.
Art Interview: Which school did you attend there?
Alex Zwarenstein: I did a post-graduate at the Royal Academy of Arts, which is a 3-year Master's Degree, but before that I studied art at Harrow College of Art and Kingston Polytechnic. Art education is about the same everywhere in the UK; you do a foundation year first, after that a bachelors degree and then a post-graduate degree if you are lucky enough to go that far.
Art Interview: What was your opinion of art school?
Alex Zwarenstein: Oh well... it was hell of a good time. I loved it! For me leaving a small town was an incredible experience. It was almost personality changing, very liberating and art school was a wonderful experience, I don't know of anything to compare it with. The school had a very good system. You learned as much from your fellow students as from your teachers. There was always an instructor who had empathy with your work stylistically; you always received encouragement.
Art Interview: When you were in school were you aware of the contemporary art scene and what was happening?
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Alex Zwarenstein
Diagon
2005
Oil on canvas
50 x 62 inches |
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Alex Zwarenstein: Absolutely. We often had lively debates about what was good, what was new, what was going on. Students had all possible approaches to the subject. So it was really a good education.
Art Interview: Were you actively seeking out galleries for your own work at that time?
Alex Zwarenstein: No. But all my leisure time was spent either sketching or going to the art galleries, to see what was being done.
Art Interview: Were there any artists that affected your style or whose work you admired?
Alex Zwarenstein: Of course there were many artists I admired, and they all had an impact on my work, to a greater or lesser extent. Although they might be doing something completely different than me.... there was always something to be learned.
Art Interview: Was the art that you made in school similar to what you are doing now?
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Alex Zwarenstein
Model in cream and brown
1975
60 x 40 inches |
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Alex Zwarenstein: I tried a lot of different things when I was studying. For a short time I worked abstractly. But my abilities and natural inclination invariably directed me back to representation, however stylized.
Art Interview: Were they teaching representational art at your school?
Alex Zwarenstein: Yes. At the school they had a foundation year where you got to try little bit of everything, 3-dimensional design, graphic work, typesetting. Then when you did the degree course after that, you pretty much concentrated on your own studio work.
Art Interview: Was representational art a major contemporary force in England during the 70s?
Alex Zwarenstein: Figurative work was front and center in England during the 70's. The influence of people such as Ron Kitaj and David Hockney made a big impact on us.
There were English artists like John Hoyland who made abstract expressionism or Paul Huxley with his hard edge paintings....They were the English versions of what was going on in America. But for British artists, expressionism was still a little bit of an adopted modality from America; to that extent that it wasn't the mainstream in the way it was to become.
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Euan Uglow
(1932-2000)
The Quarry Pignano
1979-80
Oil on canvas
80 x 113.12 cm
Arts Council Collection, Hayward Gallery, London
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The major artists were figurative or a stylization of figurative work; people like Euan Uglow, who influenced me a great deal, Lucian Freud, Peter Blake, Norman Blamey, Peter Greenham and even Francis Bacon. I am not saying Francis Bacon influenced me very much but he was still figurative. All the big names were figurative. Even people with very expressionistic work like Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach were roughly speaking figurative. So it wasn't a matter of reluctantly turning to representational art for me. It is something I enjoy doing a lot, perhaps because I found the very strong English tradition of narrative painting, conducive to me. There is some sort of story-like element in there that is open to incorporating the psychology that I'm trying to put across.
Art Interview: How did you end up in New York?
Alex Zwarenstein: After I graduated I taught 2 different courses at one of my old schools, Harrow College of Art. I was just about making a living by teaching until I lost one of my teaching days, and it freed me up to make this decision.
I'd always been interested in the art scene in America, even when I first came to England. Almost every year I would fly to New York. It was so cheap in those days; a round trip airfare was only 70 pounds. Can you believe it? (Laugh). So in 1983 I thought it was an opportune time to just go to New York. I thought that I'd give it a try and see what it would be like to live here for a while. But I stayed and I got married.
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Alex Zwarenstein
Eyes of New York
1998
Oil on canvas
36 x 24 inches |
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Art Interview: What did you do with all of the art you had in England? Did you transport it to New York?
Alex Zwarenstein: I carried what I could, but most of it I left with somebody I knew and they put it up in their attic. I haven't seen it since. I think I've got photographs of some of the work from art school and sometimes I look back and think that I'd like to have it. I also lent a number of people paintings, but at this point I'd be a little too embarrassed to go back to reclaim my work. So most of my very early work is in the hands of friends in England.
Art Interview: When did you start with your first gallery?
Alex Zwarenstein: My first one-man show was relatively late in my career. I had it in 1998 at the Eleanor Ettinger Gallery. Before that I had been showing my paintings in group shows and making a steady living off of various forms of illustration; magazine covers and the like.
Art Interview: Did the group shows prepare you for your solo exhibitions?
Alex Zwarenstein: No, not really, with group shows you're not so much under the gun. You can produce at your leisure, which is both good and bad but with a solo show you have to get a certain number of paintings completed. It gets you generating a lot more work. You just have to turn out a lot of paintings and generate enough ideas.
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Alex Zwarenstein
Water Towers
2005
24 x 18 inches |
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Art Interview: How essential is productivity to an art career?
Alex Zwarenstein: For me it is very important. But that is not the case for everybody. I don't benefit stylistically from slowing down. Over time, you get to understand your own process by just doing a lot of it. You know, I can become just a little self-indulgent if I slow down. I need to generate a lot of ideas, to see how they work visually...just by making a lot of mistakes and learning to recognize them as such. I need to explore ideas through the end of the brush, not just in the mind. But when an artist's work is painstakingly detailed.... they simply can't work any quicker. Each technique, each approach has to be determined by the artist.
Art Interview: Was your illustrative work very different from what you are doing now?
Alex Zwarenstein: Yes, it often involved creating a portrait of a luminary. That was essentially the job.
Art Interview: Did working as an illustrator assist you in any way as a fine artist?
Alex Zwarenstein: Other than just giving me the confidence to plow through a lot of work, I don't think so. By working a lot you get to understand the materials very well, but other than that it was not that helpful.
Art Interview: Did working for corporations as an illustrator help you to deal with galleries better?
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Alex Zwarenstein
Tapestry
1999
40 x 72 inches |
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Alex Zwarenstein: (Laugh) Probably not. I don't think so. I was always a freelancer but in every case I was represented by an agent whose job was to find me work. So I don't think that my business sense improved at all as an illustrator. I guess it may have helped to understand that a gallery is simply a shop window. It's a business and you can't really mess with that. Doing and enjoying your work is the only thing, you know. The galleries can't be romanticized, because one will be disappointed; it is business, but it is not the artist's business.
Art Interview: How did you manage to get into the Eleanor Ettinger Gallery?
This oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Alex Zwarenstein on October 21, 2005. The interview took place over the telephone between Berlin, Germany, and New York, New York, USA and was conducted by Brendan Davis for Art Interview Online Magazine.
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