Tim Zuck: Paintings and Drawings

M. Wayne Cunningham, formerly the director of Academic and Career
Programs at East Kootenay Community College, is a freelance writer
specializing in the arts in Kamloops, British Columbia.

This collection of images and essays illuminates the life and work of
Ontario artist Tim Zuck. The 41 black-and-white and 32 color photographs
of Zuck’s still-life and figure drawings and

landscapes are treasures that call for repeated viewing. The four
supplementary essays provide four distinctive views about the artist and
his creativity.

“The Order of Things,” by Toronto writer Ron Graham, is a
biographical sketch of Zuck’s life, from his birth in 1947 in Erie,
Pennsylvania, through the sociocultural, religious (Quaker), and
educational influences that contributed to his current mid-life career
in Midland, Ontario. “Still Life in a Landscape,” by editor and
renowned art historian Ramsay Cook, is a perceptive examination of the
“essential issues of art and representation ... always implicit in
Zuck’s drawings.” “In a Calm Irony,” by William Moore, director
and curator of the MacLachlan Art Centre in Barrie, Ontario, provides a
novel comparison between Zuck’s artistic world and that of Alice in
Wonderland.

As insightful and penetrating as these essays are “A Cigar Is Only a
Cigar,” which is quintessential Zuck. This 23-page record of a
conversation between Zuck and Jean Blodgett, director of collections and
programs at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinberg, Ontario,
presents a thought-provoking portrait of an artist who, after a lifetime
of pondering such topics as creativity, abstract expressionism, and the
ambiguity of language, has concluded that “[t]he great thing about
good art is that if you are open to it, it can cause you to look at your
life in a slightly different way and work through some things again. And
there is a very small amount of the public that can actually take
that.”

Zuck’s curriculum vitae, a bibliography, and lists of his drawings
and paintings complete this visually pleasing and highly recommended
volume.