Elephant

Following the Brush: John Zurier on How Place Seeps Into the Psyche
By Julia Shanker, in conversation with John Zurier
December 8, 2025

In John Zurier’s Pink Dust, on view at Peter Blum Gallery, color behaves like weather. Thin veils of pigment hover, drift, and settle with precision and intention. Zurier, known for his restrained abstractions and attunement to light, splits his time between Berkeley, California, and Reykjavik, Iceland; two distinct geographies that shape his palette and pace. 

Zurier speaks about the way place seeps into the psyche, the paradox of completion, and his meditative act of “following the brush.” We also chatted about Ron Padgett’s poetry, Buddhist rituals, and how Zurier recognises when a painting is complete.

Julia Shanker: How does the environment in which you paint influence your process — both materially and emotionally? What role does place play in your work? And more specifically, how does Icelandic geography influence Pink Dust?

John Zurier: Places get in your bones and your psyche. They become the air you breathe, the ground you walk, the food you eat, your language. They’re linked with feelings of familiarity and newness, the notion of home, and of being far from home.

Metaphorically, a painting can be thought of as being its own place. A painting is a site with its own physical characteristics, terrain and weather, historical and emotional associations, and embedded meaning. Both California and Iceland are influential to my work, and it’s bound up with color tone, atmosphere, mood, and the surfaces of things. I’m not trying to deliberately depict them. I’m more interested in making the paintings empty so that what’s essential to these places can flow into them.

I like how barren and exposed Iceland is. The color there is subtle and complex and changes constantly with the weather. My attachment to it is emotional. One of the things about Iceland is that I’m often reminded of sensations and feelings I had as a child growing up in LA. When I’m there I think of Velázquez. I’m not sure how to understand that. I could say it’s connected to a feeling of expansive freedom, and that’s an abstract and wonderful feeling. But I’m more interested in sensations—looking at a mountain or grit in the air, the way a cold light falls on hard ground. I think you can see that in the paintings.

JS: Do you keep visual or written records (i.e., sketches, notes, or photographs) to capture what inspires you in the Icelandic landscape?

JZ: I do, in a loose-leaf kind of way. I keep notebooks, scraps of paper with drawings, scribbles, jottings about color, weather, light, times of day. I also keep a studio notebook for myself with notes about the paintings in progress, listing color mixes—it’s a journal of sorts. I take a lot of photographs too, though I don’t often look at them when I’m working or use them as references for the paintings. I rarely make studies for paintings, but I make a lot of color tests and material tests before and while I’m working.

JS: How is your Berkeley studio different than your studio in Reykjavík, and how does this influence your practice?

JZ: My Berkeley studio is a large, L-shaped, 2,000-square-foot space with a fourteen-and-a-half-foot ceiling and a tall, wide bank of frosted windows facing north. It’s on a very noisy corner. The studio I had in Iceland for the past six years was a small rectangular room, 150 square feet, with a seven-and-a-half-foot ceiling and a window that looked out across a vast view—a scrappy yard, hay bales, fields of horses, the sea, and the glacier Snæfellsjökull many miles away in the distance.

In Berkeley, the studio is serene. I keep it very spare—not a lot of visual clutter. With the frosted windows I can’t see outside, but I can hear people talking and the sounds of cars and radios and fire trucks and motorcycles revving at the stoplights. Even with that, it feels very private. At the end of the day before sunset, the light comes streaming from the west, from the direction of the San Francisco Bay. It reflects off the neighboring buildings and fills the studio with golden light.

In Iceland the landscape, the wind and weather are a constant presence. Except for the birds and the occasional sound of a trailer dropping off or picking up horses, or a tractor delivering hay bales, it felt secluded and like a refuge. I was directly affected by the shifting weather happening out the window throughout the day. I paint mostly in natural light in both studios. In Iceland the light would change sometimes quite dramatically—from cold grey to blue to yellow and pink, within minutes. Other times the twilight felt extended, hovering for hours. 

JS: When did you first read Ron Padgett’s poetry? How did you feel when you first read it?

JZ: I was introduced to Padgett’s poems through the poet Bill Berkson in the ’90s. I’ve always read poetry, and through my friendship with Bill I began reading more of the New York School Poets. Bill would talk sometimes about Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, and Ron Padgett. I don’t remember the first poem of Padgett’s I read, but I do remember a feeling of delight. I was obsessed for a while with his translations of Guillaume Apollinaire.

With Ron Padgett’s permission, I titled my show at Peter Blum after his latest book, Pink Dust. The book is brilliant. I can’t recommend it enough.

JS: Do you see the title of this collection as literal or metaphorical?

JZ: I think it’s both. In Ron Padgett’s poem, the pink dust comes from erasing words on a page with one of those old pink erasers on a wheel with a little brush attached. Literal eraser dust brushed or blown away. It’s also a metaphor for the history of all erased words in one’s life—all the corrections, adjustments, revisions, the concentration and effort that goes into making a poem. And in Padgett’s case, one that is simple, breezy, effortless, and very precise. The poem starts off the first chapter “Residue.” It’s nice too for me to think of the phrase “being in the pink” when reading a poem reflecting on the erased words, dust from the gaps, as the residue of a life’s work.

For me, the title Pink Dust carries a lightness, and I take it as metaphorical in the same sense as Padgett’s poem. It recalls the many erasures, all the scraping down and wiping out needed to make these paintings appear easy, like it simply happened. It’s also literal––as a pigment used in a few of the paintings, and as a reference to the light of dawn and dusk: and also the gritty violet pink in the large painting A History of Pink Dust. That painting carries with it the wind and weather and seeing it as it happens. In a way, it contains my praise and farewell to the house and studio I had in Iceland.

JS: Tell me more about the painting’s “breathing.” What does this mean? Is this something unique to this body of work or a recurring theme across your practice?

JZ: Yes, I would say it’s a recurring theme, something I look for and want to happen. Breath is everything. It’s being alive. And I want this to happen in a very relaxed way.

Breathing in painting involves color and touch and being very sensitive to it. It’s a metaphor. Another way of saying it would be to talk about color modulation or the pulsing that can be seen on the surface of the painting. It also involves constructing with color areas, in warm and cool color tones and patches as a primary impulse, as opposed to composing with drawing first in values of dark and light, then adding or filling in with color afterwards. That’s how Picasso meant it when he said to François Gilot, “Matisse has good lungs.”

JS: How do you know when a painting is complete?

JZ: About twenty years ago, I made a painting I called Nothing to Add. It came together rather quickly, which I hadn’t expected, and I didn’t know what I was looking at. I was sure it needed something more and kept looking at it and wondering what that could be. After a while, I put it away. A year later, I pulled it out and realized immediately that it was finished—there was nothing to add. It had a loose, unfurling quality compared to other paintings from that time. What kept me from seeing it as complete was my self-doubt and preconceptions about what a finished painting should look like.

I’m an improvisational painter. Like with musical improvisation, it’s a matter of inserting a moment of freedom into a given and known structure. Improvisation is not guesswork, but it’s a risk, and it’s thrilling. I think the sense of knowing when a painting is finished comes from truly knowing the material and having a feel for it in my hands and whole body. It involves confidence and trust and takes a long time to develop. Often I think to myself, “I’m simply following the brush,” and that’s what it feels like. On a good day, it feels like floating and then landing perfectly. But even then, I don’t always know, and I’d rather err on the side of it being unfinished than destroy what has appeared. So I need to wait and to look and ask my friends what they see. My painting could be complete at any moment. This involves seeing and capturing a wholeness and unity, even if it looks careless and undone.

What helps me is looking at Chinese and Japanese paintings and thinking about traditional Japanese aesthetics. Unlike the Western painting tradition that values completion, clarity, smoothness, intense color, and permanence, traditional Eastern and Japanese painting flips this around and puts a much higher value on incompletion, suggestion, roughness, reduced color, and impermanence.

JS: Did you have a particular routine when constructing this body of work? Music you listened to or habits you picked up while creating?

JZ: I usually go to the studio seven days a week. I’m disciplined, but I don’t do the same thing every day. I’m a Buddhist practitioner and begin my mornings in the studio with chanting and end my evenings with chanting. That brackets my work and life. The music I listened to most while making these paintings was Kali Malone’s organ and choral music. One of my recent paintings was titled after her latest album, All Life Long.

JS: Which artists do you look to for inspiration, or do you admire, particularly within contemporary abstraction?

JZ: I look mostly at historical painting—Corot and almost all French painting, the Nordic painters like Lars Hertervig, Carl Fredrik Hill, Ivan Aguéli, Edvard Munch, Jóhannes Kjarval. Also Ferdinand Hodler and the Italian Primitives, especially Pietro Lorenzetti. I come out of New York School painting, especially the paintings of Franz Kline and Mark Rothko, Richard Diebenkorn, and Elmer Bischoff. I’m influenced by the paintings of Robert Ryman and Raoul De Keyser, Louise Fishman, Suzan Frecon, Mary Heilmann, as well as older British artists Prunella Clough and Winifred Nicholson. For these recent paintings, I was looking, thinking, and reading a lot about Gwen John and her painting technique and color palette coming from Whistler, though I don’t think it shows as an obvious reference.

What I like about all these very different historical and contemporary painters is how they handle color, light, and atmosphere, and the way they allow paint to be both substance and light, both material and immaterial. That tension—between the physical reality of the surface and the atmospheric quality it can evoke—is where my painting lives.

JS: What feelings or ideas do you hope to leave viewers with?

JZ: Painting is about giving. Pleasure, delight, a sense of being connected to something larger than oneself, real feeling. These are the things I get from looking at art. My greatest hope would be to offer compassion in the face of reality.