artist_zachvanhorn

so you mention your cat Genivieve on your site, but you don't paint her? is she one of those hairless cats or something?

Yes, Genevieve is my baby girl even though she won’t admit it. She is a gray tabby and a conversationalist. In my old apartment she would be in the same room as me but now that I live in a house I have my own room for my stuff so she stays out of it. She likes to chew things when she gets anxious and she's eaten plastic and had surgery to get that out before so it's for her own good that she can't be in my studio with me. She's grown to understand that now. I actually have painted her before. The painting "Observant To Exhaustion" from 2023 is of a picture of her shortly after I got her in 2020 where she was so skeptical of living with me that she rarely slept. She would follow me around and watch me and in this image she couldn't stay awake any longer and just conked out in my doorway.

what is it about the lines and patterns in your art? It adds a very interesting look and feel, some kind of chaotic thrum of symmetry to the world you are creating. What are you saying with all of this?

The lines are a solution to the problem of how to intertwine multiple images into one painting. My paintings for a long time now have been trying to contain these geometric, pixel/glitch imagery with recognizable imagery in a way where they both together create a “new thing”. You can actually see some of that struggle in trying to find this balance in my earlier works from 2022 on my website.

The lines started as these little drawings that I would then project onto my pieces. It wasn’t until I had the epiphany while watching the 2018 film Annihilation that making those lines symmetrical would be the way to go. I haven't turned back since. For a while those lines were just painted on the surface in multiple layers but then I eventually also thought of just making the lines themselves the pixelated imagery.

I would say that I’m trying to show how underlying elements influence our perceptions of reality. I’ve always equated glitch imagery to be more about how programming yields specific results and how just one line of code can dramatically alter the output of how information is perceived. Symmetry is another one where there is a kind of universality of beauty with symmetry whether it be of physical forms or binary concepts. The colors in the lines also impact the spatial relations between the forms in both layers.

we need to hear more about waterbuffalo. But alas, we aren't a spotify user, so we can't listen...how do we hear your music, and does it relate to your art in any way? Does it come from the same creative space?

So I’m pretty sure the music is on any streaming platform. I used cd baby as a distribution method to get the work onto streaming platforms. I mainly use spotify so that’s why I used that as my source to share my music.

I would say that my music does in fact relate a lot to my visual work though I think that has been pretty unintentional. I’ve been told before that my visual work looks musical in a way and I can see that. I think the thing that mainly dictates the direction I take with my work is more the reflection after something is made than the process, which to many people might come as confusing because my work is so process-based. The paintings really started years ago as messes and experiments that I then reflect upon and take what works and leave behind what doesn’t work at that time. The same can be made with the music where I spend a good deal of time reacting to whatever elements I add to the specific songs. There is an emotional, underlying something that I strive to see in a physical object or hear in a song. I would say the two do come from the same creative space though the processes are dramatically different.

please describe the process you go through with the wood as your medium, the amazing patterned lines, what comes first, and how do you start a new piece?
My pieces all start as color studies on small pieces of paper. I basically make a ton of tiny little shapes of paint on paper of various colors, throw them in a shoe box, and then play with those shapes until I get these little color studies. I then translate those to acrylic paint on larger pieces of paper that then get cut up and glued back together to create a pseudo pixelated mosaic. I then mask out the symmetrical lines on top of that, paint the imagery, remove the tape, and then finally sand the surface of the painting once the paint is dry. The texture of the surface of the painting is actually the cut paper and the sanding allows for the inconsistencies of the cut paper to resurface from under the painting, leaving extra marks on the surface which pushes back the bold colored lines into the painting.

tell us about your 'small work' section of your online shop, you have pixellation-themed art that is very right-angled and organic art that flows like water, why the dichotomy and why are they 'small' to you?
The small work section of my shop probably makes more sense now after explaining the process but I tend to make my pixelated mosaic larger than the wood panel I mount it on, so I generally have leftover scraps of that layer. The smaller pieces with those are just that, mounted remains of another project that still look good that then can be its own piece. The same goes for the organic pieces that I just add fluid medium to leftover acrylic paint and then pour them on smaller panels. I refer to these as being smaller because they aren’t as dense as my main work but still have some merit and value.

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Zach Van Horn

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