Peter Ziou

I am writing down a thought as I sit surrounded by trees overlooking a small spring with a pond. There are no sounds of cars; luckily no planes have passed over me. I have painted landscapes for quite sometime now. They became important because nature took me away from the pain and suffering I felt when I was painting people: the human condition. So I look for isolated instances where I feel the light on a rock, or a small leaf or plant-life growing out of a stone. I remember sitting on the sidewalk drawing people as they went by. Then, I noticed a crack in the sidewalk and out of it came a dandelion. For me, this moment confirmed that nature will always grow through everything we make in the human world eventually bringing it back to a garden. My favorite landscapes are the ones that feel very private. When I paint the atmosphere of the landscape housed in a particular mix of colors for that moment, then I feel I’ve succeeded. If I can paint the heat of the sun, sand and shrubs where I walk, then I’ve created a good painting. The painting has to have an attachment to my spirit, to a very momentary instance, a memory of something that I cannot put into words that exists within nature and my relationship to it. When I walk, draw and photograph nature, I also use it as a time for prayer and cleansing.