How to Paint

Over forty years Jerry Zeniuk has created an autonomous oeuvre that revolves around colour, with its diverse possibilities of expression. However, colour often advocates for abstract emotion, which only finds its way to objectivity by means of structure and form. Over time, this tension has regularly prompted Zeniuk to express his thoughts on the fundamental questions of painting in lectures and essays. How to Paint brings these reflections together in a single publication. In thirty-seven short chapters, comparable with meditations, the painter sheds light on what characterises a painting in the first place and on what still accounts for its reputation today, since the categories for describing the quality of visual art have become blurred. Our ability to see in a differentiated way has diminished as well. Reading the unmistakable alphabet and the syntax of a painting is no longer a matter of course. The author writes: "I'm interested in seeing properly. Seeing is thinking. Painters are conceptual artists. We see pictorial structures where there is supposedly only surface and material." In simple diction and with comprehensible observations, Zeniuk circles around this major topic and in doing so touches on several central questions - in particular: How does art, a cognitive fact, arise at all from the seemingly simple act of applying oil pigment to a surface? For Zeniuk, this question has not changed over the centuries. His text is accompanied by selected illustrations from works on the history of painting, from Titian to Velazquez, to Cezanne and Mondrian.