Alexander Zarick was responsible for my becoming a professional painter. That really is all that needs to be said, but I will not leave it there. I met Alex in the 70’s and immediately felt comfortable in his presence. At that time, I was doing photography professionally and also as an art form. When Alex saw my images, he immediately stated that my compositions and vision were that of a painter and suggested I should be painting seriously. We would spend time discussing painting and art in general, and along with a few other artists, I learned a lot. Until then, I had only painted for fun, and over the next several years, I started to develop as a painter, even while doing photography.

Alex was one of those transcendent people whom artists, poets, musicians, and actors, such as the then-aspiring thespian/playwright Sam Shepherd, visited to exercise their creativity. An abstract figurative painter, he and his wife, Joye, also a painter, ran the Zarick Gallery in Farmington, Connecticut, during the 1950s and 1960s. Unusually, most of his work has been lost. He attended the Maryland School for the Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago, and is listed in “Who, Was, Who in American Art.” The pieces below were done in the 50’s and early 60’s. He was born in 1929, but he suffered from a bad heart, which limited his body of work. He died of a heart attack in 1982.