Zach Storm
Passageway 7 (A Layered History) 2020
Silverpoint ground, metal leaf, encaustic and oil on hand dyed canvas mounted to aluminum panel
They are all subtle in their approach. Richard Oelze and Yves Tanguy probably do the most for me, in terms of content. They have surrealist leanings that really blend the inner workings and the outside world that I identify with.”
- Zach Storm
Los Angeles native, Zach Storm, demonstrates his process when creating his brilliant and vivid works. Storm transcends his familiar mechanically inclined nature, as a means for creating and understanding his paintings. Quiet, contemplative and mood driven. His paintings allow the individual viewer to decide the undertone of each painting. If you are down, they’re down. If you feel good, they feel good.
Storm incorporates several components like metallic leaf under the thin glazing, which reflects light. Thus his works are literally and figuratively reflective. Storm’s inspiration stems from several landscape and surrealist painters.
Artist Series'
Layered History Paintings
By layering some of our oldest known mediums atop one another to create a landscape painting, Zach intends to imbibe the image with the weight of the history of those mediums.
In this way the landscape feels both ancient and contemporary. It is very often Zach’s aim to capture the representation of the passage of time within a single static image.
Rub Paintings
These paintings emerged out of Zach Storm’s under-paintings.
The paintings rely on the notion that slow, incremental change adds up to something far greater than any one event. Each layer of paint is carefully rubbed onto and into the surface of the previous layer. Each layer is made translucent by mixing it with bodied oil and leaded glass.
The result is that every bit of the painting’s history is viewable creating a timeline of its evolution. The goal is to balance fantasy, landscape and the movement of time through the repetitive, simple gesture of rubbing paint onto a surface.
Halcyon Paintings
The paintings in this series are meant to inspire fondness for the past and meditation on the future. The past that Storm ponders on is a memory of somewhere imagined and the idea of imagining the future with anything other than an educated guess fueled by memories of the past.
MIRage Paintings
In his series, Mirage Paintings, Zach Storm creates a group of paintings that immediately captivate and draw the observer in. As the viewer approaches the paintings, they begin to slowly reveal themselves.
Typically, the depiction of mirage is a singular, fluttering image, quite often a landscape within a landscape (a grotto, a spring, some salvation).
Storm often plays with a layout that lends itself to having a similar quality. In these paintings, specifically, Zach pays tribute to the way that a flash photograph or a cars headlight’s tend to bounce off the closest objects, creating an optical effect similar to how a mirage is described. Storm hopes that the work will reward those that like to stare and wonder.
