I’m Zacheriah Kramer. I graduated from FAA/Sweden in 2011. In these posts I’ll show a little of what I have been up to through the years, and talk a bit about my process and what interests and drives me.

Colorado was my childhood home, but I have lived in the nordic countries for almost 19 years now. I drew a lot growing up, but it was studies in philosophy that really awakened my interest in pursuing visual art. Gadamer’s Truth and Method was a pivotal text for me. After two years of trying to learn painting on my own in Sweden, I realized I needed help. Discovering the atelier tradition and the newly opened FAA in nearby Mölndal was enourmous for me. My wife and I immediately dropped everything we had going and moved to Gothenburg.

The rigour and hands–on approach to learning the craft fit me perfectly. After having struggled on my own, it was almost unbelievable to me how quickly it was possible to learn new skills, though I always had far more to learn than I suspected. I cherished my time there, both as a student, and later as a teacher.

Though I loved the beautiful north light of the studio, I found myself as often drawn to the shifting light of the outdoors, and spent a lot of my extra time working outside. My first attempts at painting the landscape from life were poor, but I kept at it partly because for me, even a small amount of progress was intoxicating. Many years later I am still learning with each new try. The level of challenge has not abated, but hopefully the results are occassionally better. I have found no resting place for excercising my craft, where I can just relax and paint as if it’s easy, and I believe now that I never will.

Teaching has been an important part of my path. Though I have enjoyed teaching at various places, it was the greatest honor to teach at FAA, and something I have certainly missed.

WEIGHT OF EXPERIENCE

During my atelier training I noticed that something dramatic was happening to my perception. As I made my first small steps to seeing with greater understanding (I will always be a beginner), the world began to transform for me, and my way of being a part of it began to follow. I noticed that the attention required to give a thing weight on my canvas gave it likewise weight in my soul, opening my inner floodgates so that the river of being could rush in, sculpting me on the inside the way a river sculpts a canyon. There was a sense in which it was like a second childhood. This simple observation has grown in my mind and has had a profound effect on my artistic practice.

I wanted my craft to heighten this character-forming aspect as much as I could, to give the world room to surprise me and ruin my false notions, to challenge my simplified mental representations of it. I wanted my craft to help me be present to the world with all my senses, reaching toward it in all its flowing magnificence, and to sense myself as part of it. Working from life holds the potential to be a kind of contemplative act that deepens wonder. There are of course other good reasons to draw and paint, and likewise other contemplative acts that don’t involve drawing and painting, but for me, in my life, this dynamic is paramount.

Studies from life are thus the backbone of my artistic practice. I often try to paint what strikes me as beyond my ability (complex or moving things, changing light, etc), as much for the sake of this more general personal growth as progressing in craftsmanship.

HAND EASEL

Desiring to pursue painting as a way to see the world anew, I was interested in trying to paint spontenious scenes with shifting light and moving people, especially children. I designed a hand-held easel for that purpose. I still use it often. I can hold it steadily while standing by bracing it against a thigh, and can pinch it between my knees for hands-free painting while sitting. With it, I can easily follow children around (and even the occasional horse). It’s not perfectly balanced if it has a large panel on it, but it’s still easier to hold than the thumbboxes I’ve tried, and it easily accomodates panels of any ratio up to about 40×40 cm. I often use it as a studio palette too; sometimes clipping on a study that I am using while painting a larger canvas. The initial version had the panel and the palette on the same plane. I later reworked it so that the panel area is at a slight angle to the palette area.

SIMPLE LIFE

To encourage the kind of intense engagement with the world I tried to outline previously, my wife and I set out to simplify our lives as much as we were capable; to ”live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life” in Thoreau’s words. We moved to a tiny, simple cottage and began making as much of our own food as we could, and to make life work with ultra-simple solutions, to see what the experience would do to us. Having very little money was a great teacher, something we have been repeatedly thankful for. There I learned what it was to be cold during the winter, and by contrast the depth of joy that the first snowdrops, or the first notes of the spring song of the great tit, can bring. The winter was heavy, but gifted the lightness of spring the way that a fast makes the simplest meal heavenly. We had an energetic naivite that made the whole thing adventurous. I painted the patch of earth I was trying to rely on for my continued life. Texts I read then that directly influenced my art were Pierre Hadot’s masterpiece “What is Ancient Philosophy”, and Dionysius’ mystical text “On the Divine Names”. Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” was formative. Tomas Tranströmer was constantly with me.

There were wonderful people around us who helped make our experiment possible, helping with a studio, supporting me through teaching opportunities and patronage, and even allowing me to trade paintings for a flour mill and firewood.

When the children came, my fascination with them took up much of my artistic energy. Learning to live closer to the land, trying to be an artist, and learning to be a parent was often hard, but in my memory that time shimmers with arcadian or edenic light. I had a studio then, but spent most my time painting outdoors and making studies of my family.

BEYOND STUDIES

Though I find myself happily within the representational tradition, and I deeply appreciate naturalistic studies in the spirit of Albrecht Dürer’s animal and foliage studies, I’ve never wanted to pursue a strict naturalism exclusively. Among my many favorite artists are GF Watts, William Blake, and Käthe Kollwitz. I like to play with what I learn through careful, literal studies, and transform what I am discovering into pictures I hope can gesture toward and embody something of the inner life. There are many failures, but I find that I can’t be at peace unless I try. I’m still very much learning.

These compositions grow from studies, but are intensified and recomposed in my memory and imagination. I like these made up scenes to have a sense of sponteneity and movement, to echo the unpredictable and playful magnificence of the unfolding world, not as a snapshot would have it, but as the world seems in its flowing forth in time, connected to things remembered and to hopes and fears.

Humans often melt into the surroundings. With the surface quality of my paintings I want to underscore that human bodies, along with all organic life, spring from the mud (which pigment mixed with oil more or less is). This surface also distiguishes these hand-made objects from intangible backlit images on screens that are ubiquitous in our age. I am interested in how patches of earth stuck to a board or bit of cloth have the potential to reach beyond the horizon of speech, and into the mysterious depths of human hearts.

FINLAND AND LOCAL MATERIALS

Five years ago we moved to Finland, and three years ago we bought a tired old place in Swedish Ostrobotnia, where we continue our attempts to live simply, intentionally, and as lightly as we can. We fail in many ways, but we are still happy learners. My energy these last three years has largely been directed to building and renovating, most significantly among many things, bricking up a large massive masonry heater with a baking oven and a hot seat. I have only been able to paint sporadically in the gaps. It has been physically and emotionally exhausting, but now I am eagerly returning to picture-making.

Through my attempts in the direction of ”self-sufficiency” I’ve become interested in making pictures using materials I can find or make myself, as a symbolic gesture of trying to weave myself into the fabric of this place, to root myself as one replanted. I have been making charcoal from trees and bushes from my land, and making bone-ash white from moose vertebrae. I have been drawing on wallpaper I found in my attic, and have been gathering nettle fibers and other plant fibers to make paper out of. I have pigment from clay I dug out of my celler, and binder of moose collagen I rendered. My first attempt to make a picture wholly from my own hand-made materials will come soon.

I am so incredibly thankful for everyone who has helped me make this path possible, with teaching opportunities, patronage, and by sharing wisdom, insight, critique and encouragement in diverse ways.

Text and image by Zacheriah Kramer (unless credited in caption)
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zacheriahkramer/