Micheal Zarowsky

This artist has an uncanny ability to isolate the essence of a landscape, and then illuminate the small part of the whole...

Micheal Zarowsky seems to have a line of vision that is altogether novel and intriguing. He sees some fragment of a far larger landscape and he takes this element, turns it a little, plays with the colors, and creates a painting that is highly appealing blend of Impressionism and realism.

 

The effect is startling because it is extraordinarily evocative of an Ontario landscape. We have seen all this intricate microcosm a thousand times, but it may never have occurred to us how much it is an essential part of the more familiar whole. We might wish that Micheal would stay at home in Grey County, or in Georgian Bay, or Muskoka, because we have an abundance of subject matter to offer him here. Even so, he has recently traveled to Nova Scotia where, to the surprise of no one at all, he has discovered dories and dinghies, great barnacle-encrusted posts, rocks, fish houses and salt ponds. And, of course, the result has been a whole new series of paintings in which we see the surfaces, lines, volumes and masses of colour that make us think of the sea and of the people who live there. Once again the work tends to be suggestive, allusive, and yet unmistakably of Nova Scotia, and by Micheal Zarowsky. It is a remarkable achievement.

 

This artist has an uncanny ability to isolate the essence of a landscape, and then illuminate the small part of the whole, which becomes the very symbol of that which it represents. That, of course, is what abstraction is all about; but the genius of Micheal Zarowsky is that he presents the effect of abstraction while he is actually painting in a realistic way some isolated element that signifies, with utmost economy, the wider scene.