Biography
Rob Vander Zee paints fantastic worlds filled with imagined plants and mutant human-like creatures. The work expresses his fascination with how science is reshaping life on Earth. Born in 1971 in Grand Rapids MI, the artist grew up in rural Cedar Springs, surrounded by nature. Vander Zee was a self-realized artist at an early age. He can hardly remember a time when he didn’t have a pencil or pen in his hand during his childhood. He went on to major in both painting and drawing at Aquinas College. There he studied with Larry Blovits, a painter who taught Old Master’s techniques in oil painting. Vander Zee received his MFA from Michigan State University in 1998. His paintings at the time were influenced both by 17th century Flemish still lifes, and by the new figural painting of the 1980s.
Vander Zee began a mural painting business while in graduate school and continued it in Richmond VA, where moved to in 1998. The murals both helped him to develop his painting skills and supported his own work, a series of canvases exploring personal belief systems, followed by a group of large psychological portraits. Genetic Alterations, an extended series of drawings of transformed human beings, introduced a theme which the artist would explore in his current paintings.
The landscape as a site of emotional drama became the subject of Vander Zee’s work in the mid-2000s. Referring to these paintings, and the strongly abstract work that followed, the artist acknowledges his debt to a range of artists including Turner, Diebenkorn, Nerdrum and Keifer. In 2005, Vander Zee started the gallery that bears his name in Alexandria VA, and in the following year founded a school at which he mentors 35-40 students each year. In 2005, the artist continued a series of trips that have become important influences on his work. That year traveling to Estonia as a guest of the American Estonian Embassy inspired a series of moody landscapes. In 2008 he painted Sacred Earth/Mythic Body, a series of large paintings based on Greek and Roman mythology. These paintings marked Vander Zee’s return to the human figure, which he immersed in richly colored landscape settings.
In 2009, Vander Zee exhibited his paintings in Lithuania at the Arca Gallery. Later that year, he had an exhibition at the Kaunas Contemporary Art Museum. Also in 2009 he visited the rainforests of Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands, both of whose landscapes and diverse animals triggered his artistic imagination. Later the same year Vander Zee returned to Ecuador for a three-month residency at the Itchimba Cultural Institute in Quito. There he created and exhibited the beginning of his ongoing Visions of Paradise, a series which focuses on nature transmogrified by evolution and genetic manipulation.
Vander Zee has exhibited his paintings at many venues including Gallery A, Washington DC, Trowbridge-Lewis Gallery, Middleburg VA and the Tallin Art Academy, Tallin, Estonia. His work has traveled in group exhibitions to Vilnius, Lithuania, Romania and to the Republic of Georgia. |
