To Robert Rahway Zakanitch, life is full of ordinary miracles and the boundless beauty of humanity, which he expresses on paper and canvas in what essayist David Pagel calls ?a wild collision between freewheeling bohemian abandon and settled-down domestic sociability.? After exploring formalism and abstract expressionism, Zakanitch began painting what he described as ?gestural things and patterns that were anathema to modernism. Things that I didn?t quite understand, but felt good to me.? He wanted to get back to the human rather than pursue the abstract. He wanted to reclaim beauty. By the 1970s, Zakanitch had reached critical acclaim as a fine artist and as a founder of the pattern and decoration movement. More recently, Zakanitch uses line, form, color, composition, and scale?especially scale?to create accessible, visually rich paintings. Here are more than 100 of his paintings from 1962 to 2014, with essays by David Pagel and John DeFazio.
