Frank Eric Zeidler : Statement

Statement

When I am asked what I paint, I tell people that I paint the Gods. The concept is intimidating enough to forestall any further questions and allows me to proceed with my painting in a more intuitive manner. But the figures I paint are grounded in specific metaphors and a brief explanation might provide a better appreciation of my answer.

My artistic evolution began with the drawing of the human figure. The starting point was always where the legs meet the torso. This provided an axis, a fulcrum point which allowed me to render the figure with a sense of balance. The figure could twist and turn around this point and never lose its center. Eventually I would exaggerate this point and the space between the legs until they came to be represented as vegetation, growth from out of the earth that infiltrated the figure and connected it to the ground. The figures themselves soon developed their own roots and leaves and so echoed their origins in the earth. This simple image of a plant growing up between the legs of a person and flowering in the torso established the metaphor of figure as earth and was for a long time the foundation of my artwork. Eventually the specific references to plants receded and the bodies, which had been rendered in pure silhouettes, came to be modeled in such a way that made it seem as though they had absorbed the earth into themselves. The figure had become a microcosm of the earth itself.

But this was only half the metaphor. For years I had been cutting the figure out of paper and replacing it with other papers, as in collage, or using the cut out figure as a stencil in painting. These methods left the figure as a negative space in the ground. The absence of material within the figure leaves a metaphorical shadow, and so the body can be seen as spirit. It is spirit that animates the body and separates us from the earth we come out of, if only for a brief moment. Each body is spirit manifest; each body is a God. At the same time, the figures exist only in the context of earth, of paint. It is paint that defines the physical world surrounding the figure and ties the spirit back to its own shadow, physical nature and the earth. It is in this material universe that the Human Being must live, the spirit is transient and ephemeral, and out of that brief existence comes the suffering, joy, hunger and love, all the qualities of humanity.

In my work, the representation of the human being is the meeting place of body and spirit; earth is the playground of the spirit, the body is earth animated with spirit. I paint the Gods and the earth and the people that inhabit the realm between the two. Gods, earth and people, they are all one and the same.

Frank Eric Zeidler