Houghton alum and abstract painter Stefan Zoller displayed his exhibit “Bone Memory” from January 12 to February 3 this year in Sla307 Art Space, NYC. Zoller works with heavily layered acrylic paint, and bases his pieces on the diagrammatic line drawings of his paternal grandfather, J. Harold Zoller. Intergenerational connection echoes through his recent works, and he drew the title “Bone Memory” from a poem of the same name by his father Dr. James Zoller, who teaches writing and English at Houghton.
Before he graduated from Houghton College in 2008, Stefan Zoller studied under Ted Murphy, who, he said, was his first example of a practicing painter, and whose “influence on [his] development as an artist cannot be understated.” Zoller was struck by the variance between Murphy’s “vividly colored abstractions” and his older “traditional representational portraits and floral paintings.” Zoller’s mature works are “in a constant state of flux.” He may have between 10-40 paintings in process at any given time, and, he said, Murphy’s “willingness to delve into wildly different styles of painting served as [his] primary model for what it meant to be a painter and artist.“
Stefan spends hours, days, and sometimes years with each painting. He builds thick layers of acrylic paint and other materials to create detailed textures that separate the viewer from J. Harold Zoller’s diagrams, upon which Stefan paints. These barriers obfuscate his grandfather’s precise drawings, and echo the legacy and experience of remembering a man whom Stefan never met.
“They provided an opportunity to discover things about myself that I had been attempting to get at for years,” said Stefan Zoller of the minimalist heirloom drawings his father passed on to him in 2015. “They helped crystallize the conceptual aspects of my work as well as provided a formal framework upon which to paint.”
Were you to see him wrangle copious quantities of acrylic paint as he experiments amid a mess of materials in his home studio, you likely wouldn’t guess that Zoller was once a “prideful oil painter” with a disdain for acrylics. During Zoller’s early career, the long drying time of oil paints stymied him, as they forced him to “hurry up and wait” rather than work rapidly and experimentally as he does now. When he chanced upon an opportunity to acquire a mass quantity of acrylic paints during his second semester of his MFA at Syracuse University, he found a liberty which allowed his artistic development to flourish.
“Acrylic paint enabled me to work through ideas and processes much more efficiently,” said Zoller, who has drawn influence from his father’s writing, Norse mythology, and Scandanavian heavy and extreme metal music. The compass of his influences becomes apparent in his body of work, which features pieces that range between complexity and minimalism. Some are thickly laden with paint encroaching beyond the constraining borders of his canvases, and skeletal and topographic forms manifest themselves through his process.
Looking at where his work has brought him thus far, Zoller believes that “Bone Memory” contains his most mature paintings to date, as well as several threads that will lead to new areas of exploration.
Stefan Zoller currently lives in Rochester and teaches at RIT. He fills his days teaching drawing and design, experimenting with his art, and raising his son. His roots, however, lie in Houghton. “Houghton was where I grew up, made friends, and met my wife, he said, “so I will always have that connection.” Houghton College is also the place where he studied under Ted Baxter, the professor who inspired him and arranged his first professional apprenticeship with painter Thomas S. Buechner.
In fall of 2018, Stefan Zoller will be displaying a solo exhibition in Houghton’s Ortlip Gallery. During that time he hopes to interact with the art faculty and students. “My intention is to continue to work hard,” remarked Zoller, “and my hope is that as many viewers as possible can resonate with these paintings in a way that is meaningful for them.”