Bio:

Zack Bukovich is a writer and visual artist from Eagle, Colorado--a small town in the Rockies. His initial love of language and the landscape came from an early love of reading and the inspiration he felt quietly wandering the mountains. After graduating from Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, with a bachelor’s degree in Writing, Zack moved to Berlin, Germany, where he lived for three years, teaching English and furthering his studies in painting.

His writing explores themes of identity, grief, love, and loss; while his painting explores themes of home and the exploration of self through subjects physically and emotionally closest to him. Influenced by the Haiku and lineages of Eastern and Western impressionists, Zack enjoys writing and painting in a direct way that vividly captures a specific moment in time. He currently lives in Ames, Iowa, where he studies in the Creative Writing and the Environment and Integrated Visual Arts programs at Iowa State University.

Artist Statement:

My work hinges on direct connections to landscapes, friends, flowers on countertops, and the ever-revolving versions of self. My preference for painting these often intimate subjects is to work from life, which sometimes pushes me out into shrubby highway ditches, snowy fields, or, sometimes, right outside my tent on the shores of a familiar high alpine lake close to where I grew up in the Rockies. I’m influenced by painters like Édouard Vuillard, Isaac Levitan, and Paul Cézanne, who found meaning in the mundane and chaotic details of everyday life and, through a cultivated sensitivity, used paint to say something that life couldn’t say about itself.

In this way, I approach painting not only as a way of translating what I see but also as a way of digesting and making sense of the human experience.