Sarasota Artist Karin Zukowski Paints 9/11 Vision in 1994
Online, September 12, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Sarasota, FL Karin Zukowski, a published, award-winning artist, who paints daily in her Sarasota, Florida studio, was uniquely inspired when her brush touched a blank vertical canvas in 1994. The resulting allegorical, surrealistic oil painting, which the artist named "Tower of Babel and Others," carries haunting images that would seem to reference a tragedy that had yet to take place.
For example, at the base of Zukowski's tower, an evil face vomits fire and hatred on the injured and dying. People fall out of windows accompanied by angels. At the top, an American flag is seen through a smoky haze. Frightened people seem to pause before jumping from an upper floor where the wall has been ripped away. A metal object that could be interpreted as the wing of an airplane crashes through this surrealistic "Tower of Babel."
Zukowski's painting depicts just a single tower with elements of Classic Roman architectural style rather than two sleek modern buildings. Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, albeit with one set of arms, is another reference to ancient architecture, in this incredibly moving painting. One of the architectural representations, however, just below Vitruvian Man, depicts square windows in a modern style.
Says Zukowski: "When I did this painting, my feelings were strictly related to my art. My concept was to show how humanity builds and constructs only to have things fall down again. At the same time, individual people, like myself as an artist, climb up and fall down. I climb up and I fall down. And that goes on for eternity, like a tower that never ends."
Zukowski's interest in expressive, surrealist and outsider art was carefully honed from classes at F.I.T., Parsons School of Art & Design, Pratt, Society of Illustrators, and Nyack Center for the Arts while she was living in New York from 1964 to 1985. Upon relocating to Sarasota, Florida with her family in 1985, she obtained a BFA, cum laude, from Ringling College of Art & Design, Sarasota, in 1993.
Paintings and illustrations by Karin Zukowski, a native of Vienna, Austria, are held in private art collections in the United States and abroad. "Tower of Babel and Others," oil on canvas, 30" by 84", can be viewed by appointment only. www.grannyapplepublishing.com or call 941-870-3422. ####