art
I started making watercolors during the mid-1960s while I was living in Paris, France. My main activity was writing at the time but most of the people I knew were painters and my partner, Arlene Columbus Hiquily, a poet and artist who'd attended the Art Students League of New York, strongly supported my attempts at doing water color. In the early 1970's we had a joint show at a gallery in the area that had been the wholesale food market, Les Halles, in central Paris. After I'd returned to the U.S. and was living in Washington, D.C. during the early 1980's, I had a water color exhibition at All Souls Unitarian Church on 16th Street, N.W. in the Adams Morgan area of D.C. After that I became almost totally involved in music and didn't do much painting.
It wasn't until the turn of the century that I got re-involved in making art. I took classes at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, CA and was greatly encouraged by Fran Brown who taught figure drawing, 2nd semester general drawing, and monotype printing. Her teaching method was to allow the student to find her/his own approach to the medium, and then offer help without imposing rules. It really moved me forward and introduced me to monotype printing and oil pastel. So, over the past ten years I've done a lot of work in these three mediums.
During the summer of 2009 I had a show at the Flux53 gallery in east Oakland. Recently, I've been buying bouquets of flowers and using them to inspire my current series of watercolors. These are the first works I'm presenting on my jimzeen site. They are for sale at $100 each. Contact me at jimzeen@gmail.com if you'd like to arrange to purchase any of them. After the flower series you will find reproductions of a number of other works: monotype prints*, oil pastels, and watercolors. These are also for sale at the prices indicated. I will add more works periodically.
*Note: monotype prints are one-off prints made by applying printing ink to a Plexiglas surface which is then placed on a press with paper over the inked surface and run through the press.
