lastly, in updating the bio, I see my work as contemporary impressionism.  currently focused on light, atmosphere, and transparency of water,  my explorations thru painted waters edges and forest floors emphasize vibrancy, transparency and interelationships that exists between found shapes and natural colors. The paintings are detailed enough to make them a blend of impressionism / realism / loose enough to have all the life in them.

For me, all along, the focus, is a fresh original dialogue on the Canadian landscape, where the emphasis is on the process of discovery: that is, the creative interpretation of some aspect of the world – being coupled with a second process; namely, that of inventiveness – the personal expression of what is discovered.  Simply put. Losing myself in nature opens me up to discovering new ideas which I then work out the magic I see in them for me to share with the world.

infinity rings 37  / 18×40  / watercolour painted directly on gessoed panel

         “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.”  Ian Andrew Malcolm.

Painting for me is a lot of things, but simply, overall, it is the journey, is a spiritual process connecting me to the world, is meditative – especially when it comes to ‘water’. Exploring it through the very reflections that outline its movement; the reflected sky above reaching down, the bottom, sand, rocks and grasses all reaching up towards the surface, the changing colours of the forest edges trying to define, shape and contain it. I end up painting everything but the very thing I seek to paint. winter is all about light. what makes it fascinatingly challenging is light can’t be painted directly; you can only paint the effects of light.

 Winterlight takes my breath away. What I paint is the chaotic, unpredictable, repeatedly trying to overwhelmingly please by dressing up all night in white to show off come magical morning that I find snowshoeing on sunlight after an overnight snowfall.

What I paint is not so much something beautiful, as a place from which to stand, to be, to see from,a place in which and from which to both lose and realize oneself in the world. there is a grittiness thru all my work, in anything I call beautiful. What I have always found and understood to be beautiful, has come when I am able to lose myself., become one with where I am; there is a completeness then.  Everything is simple and everything is complicated at the same time. my paintings have an overall simplicity or directness to them yet are made up of all the complicated stuff that is that simplicity.

The ideas I paint are simple direct immediate everything but obvious. Breaking what I see down to the level of simple only places me on the threshold of possibility of seeing the obvious, of seeing what there is to be seen, and even then I can’t escape my particular way of seeing which become the paintings themselves. This doesn’t mean I’ve become better at things or more efficient or even handle more things than before, just that I make room in my imagination for what comes along and still manage to get done what I began, although I get lost a lot looking only to find new ideas virtually leading to some level of seeable chaos I can break down to my way understanding – paint it in my head first – what I need to express.