As the son of an artist, I grew up immersed in art since early childhood. I never attended art school, however, in many ways my art education followed the classical tradition of apprenticeships. As a child, I spent my summers living in a cabin with my family at the Yale Summer School for Art and Music where my Dad was an art professor. When I was twelve years old, my father, Richard Claude Ziemann, taught me to print his landscape intaglio etchings. By the age of fifteen I had already printed editions for the Brooklyn Museum.

After graduating from Trinity College in Hartford CT, with an English degree, I moved to London where I studied acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. Since I couldn’t get work permits to act in England, I moved to New York City.

I went to gallery shows with my father almost every week when he worked in NYC. I began to absorb his open-minded approach to looking at all kinds of art and styles of execution, and his discerning eye for authentic artistic expression.

I printed etchings for the Watanabe Studio in Brooklyn as a support job for my acting career. After printing several complex editions for Sol Lewitt, I became one his primary assistants. I painted Sol’s murals and pencil wall drawings in museums, galleries, and private collections. I especially loved the results of overlapping transparent colored ink washes when I did his geometric murals. I vowed to experiment on my own with transparent layered colors in the future. My proficiency in executing these large scale works led to me to being recruited to paint murals for other artists and designers in Bill Gates’ home near Seattle, WA.

After that long job in Seattle I rode a Green Tortoise hippy bus to San Francisco for fun, then drove a Ryder truck to move a woman’s apartment belongings to Los Angeles in exchange for her loaning me her car in LA. In short order I got an acting agent, so I decided to move to LA.

Once again, I got support jobs in the art world. I printed etchings for the Sam Francis Estate and the Lapis Press. Jacob Samuel was my mentor there and I followed him when he began publishing and printing out of his own studio in Santa Monica, CA. MOMA recently had a survey show and book of the works that Jacob published in that studio. When work slowed down I went to Chris Burden’s studio to help fabricate a massive erector set building. This led to me working full time for several years fabricating individual artworks for him.

During all of these years, my primary focus was on acting and making films. I toured as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet, acted in several national commercials, played a small role in Ally McBeal, acted in several films, wrote three screenplays, shot short films, and a pilot, which I wrote and directed, that eventually led to a bankruptcy. Finally, I was done with acting and had to reinvent myself. So, I embraced making my own art and design work.

I initially explored abstract art using some of the painting techniques that I learned working on Sol Lewitt’s murals. I then taught myself, through sheer practice, how to draw and paint the figure. Being isolated in a back house in Los Angeles during the Pandemic, I began painting expressive, upbeat portraits of my family. It made them seem closer to me and, at that time, I needed positive images to shore up my spirits.

Several of my family members happen to be handicapped. Although that was not the focus of my painting them, it’s surprising how representation of people with disabilities, including aging parents, is relatively lacking.

Alternating between expressive figurative work and color abstraction, often on the same canvas, has been my primary focus. I’m passionate about color. Henri Matisse, Helen Frankenthaler, Richard Diebenkorn, Wayne Thiebaud, and Frank Bowling are some of my influences. I’m also passionate about old master drawings, and Jack Kirby’s art. I’m forever influenced by my father.

Additionally, I experiment with additive color by regularly transforming the Magowan Mirror Maze in San Francisco with my lighting designs and interactive rooms of underwater scenes, wild mushroom patches, and a huge butterfly. My latest pieces change their color or vanish completely in reaction to specific lighting sequences that I programmed.