Mark Zunino

‘Art from Life and Life from Art’ has been my mantra since it was suggested to decades ago by my teachers and mentors, who received it from theirs. I always took it to mean that I ought to not only work form life and observation, but that the work I make ought to be somehow connected to and be a result of my surroundings and life experience. 

The love I have always had for drawing forms and the creation of illusionistic space has satisfied the former of the two issues, and still life, as a subject, allows me to explore the visual issues I am most interested in. What I’ve discovered, however, is that as I work on each still life, I find I am more interested in the design elements of each composition rather than the reality of the physical objects themselves. As a result, I am increasingly looking to use objects which I consider to be ‘anonymous’, such as simple cubes and boxes, where I am not so attracted to the individual textures and patinas but look at them as purely abstract elements when considering relationships of shape, color, and value within a composition.

The spaces these objects reside in are another element that ultimately bears little resemblance to the actual place. I work in different studios both at work and at home, and the location of the spaces that I build a still life in may change day to day based on the studio I’m working in. Those changes may or may not be reflected in the actual drawing or painting, based on the needs of each composition. Spatial relevance, once again, is pictorial, not factual.

It seems, therefore, that I may be failing in my desire to connect my art to my life, in some respects, as nothing I paint is an honest representation of the actual visual situation in front of me. My hope, however, is that my muse is not simply to illustrate the life that surrounds me; instead, the reality of life is distilled, in its physical, psychological, and visual attributes, through the process of painting, drawing or printmaking into what I consider to be a ‘perfect’ picture.

-Mark Zunino, 2025

Mark Zunino is a Printmaker/Painter who teaches drawing, and printmaking at the Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, CT. He received his BFA from the University of Hartford's Hartford Art School and his MFA in Printmaking from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Mark has exhibited his prints and paintings in institutions such as the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN, the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME, and Vose Galleries, Boston, MA, as well as in international exhibitions in the Czech Republic, New Zealand, and the UK.  His work is in the permanent collection of the Yale Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA and the Hood Art Museum, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, amongst many other public and private collections.