Description
‘Small Blue Forest Lawn Portrait’ by Zach Mendoza
Artist: Zach Mendoza
Title: ‘Small Blue Forest Lawn Portrait’
Medium: Oil on panel
Dimensions: 6″ x 4″
Framing: Unframed
Year of Creation: 2021
About the Artwork:
“I’ve been working on a series of paintings of sculptures and headstones from Forest Lawn Memorial in Hollywood, CA. When I moved nearby several years ago, I always found Forest Lawn to be one of the quietest and most lovely parts of the LA area. There is a solemness to the cemetery of course, but there is a great beauty to the well-trimmed grass and windy hill streets that traverse the hills. Painting sculptures seems a rich subject to me because they symbolize so much.
Although it is often formulaic, there is a depth of symbolism that is already built into these granite pieces that stand above the earth. There are upward gazes to suggest hope and downward ones to suggest mourning and floral motifs to suggest spring and rebirth and these things still command a sense of quiet not unlike a painting would in a gallery.” – Zach Mendoza
About the Artist:
(Artist Bio)
My work is often a mishmash of ideas, images, half- truths and afterimages that become almost ghoulish amalgams of the sum of their parts. I find myself preoccupied with images that deal with chaos. Francis Bacon once said “I want a very ordered image but I want it to come about by chance”.
The dichotomy of chaos and order, I find are recurrent themes in my work. There are marks that come about independent of reason or expectation and these are the moments which either destroy a work or elevate it to the “not- yet-known”. Working in this way requires a constant process of disruption, reinterpretation and response. I view this process also as a microcosmic expression of the world in which we live. Everything changes constantly, is broken and reassembled an infinitude of times over in every moment. Painting, despite this, is a stagnant form of picture-making. A painting does not move like a film or animation, however, it is also very different form a photo. Painting is a unique medium that has endured throughout centuries and will for centuries hence forth, as long as there are stubborn romantic idealists like myself who aim to advance a dialogue about what it means to be alive in a beautiful medium that, unlike the rest of our world, doesn’t move.