I grew up in New York City where my parents believed my sister and I should be exposed to what they considered the greatest fine art. To accomplish this, they brought us almost every weekend to a major art museum. Gallery after gallery, we were walked by the work of the masters from the Renaissance to those breaking new ground, destroying old conventions. Those latter artists excited me. I fell in love with Van Gogh’s swirls of land and sky, Picasso’s “misplaced” eyes, De Chirico’s enigmatic city squares, Dali’s dreamscapes, Matisse’s unpredictable palette, Magritte’s avant-guard humor, and Kandinsky’s energetic splashes of solids and line.
Despite picking a career in Architecture, I found mentors for my art work at Illinois Institute of Technology in Nelli Bar and Paul Wieghardt, refugees from the Bauhaus. Later, in architectural practice, I still found time for painting and inspiration in the workshops of Peter London (No More Secondhand Art) and with Canadian painter Seymour Segal at his Quebec atelier. Beginning in the early 1990s, I began work on portraits, now numbering about eighty, of people from my ancestral village of Zinkov, Ukraine (to view, see www.alanzolashulman.com). Two artist residencies, one in Patzcuaro, Mexico, the other at Georgia’s Hambidge Center for the Arts and Sciences, were crucial to the completion of this work.
My goal as a painter is to work in a way that, at best, synthesizes those early influences into conceptions that are my own, and where the paintings I create both challenge and intrigue by their presentation and subject matter.