Zacheriah Kramer was born in 1979 in Colorado. Always drawn to the representational tradition in painting, he trained at The Florence Academy of Art in Gothenburg, Sweden, and Florence, Italy, graduating in 2011. He currently lives simply on the countryside in Ostrobotnia, Finland, with the forests and fields as his preferred studio, and where he grows and forages a large portion of his family’s food. Zacheriah works from life and memory/imagination. Spontaneous studies from life are the backbone of his work, and are made in part as a means to engage the world intensely. Zacheriah seeks to see new beauties in the common things around him as they unfold through time, with all of his senses, and with as much the attention he can.
He is interested in how the painting process moulds his life. He says, “Brush and pigment in traditional painting powerfully open the mind to the world, always revealing it in a new light. I find that the process works two ways: while a picture forms on the canvas, my own inner contours are also reworked. The world never fails to crush my expectations. To give what I experience in the world weight on canvas is to give it weight in my soul as well, allowing it to change me. The picture is in part the record of this process.” He believes that working from photographs would be to throw away a part of the opportunity painting allows to help the painter fully experience the world. He is interested in how patches of earth, from which all organic life springs, intgelligently stuck to a board, have the potential to reach beyond the horizon of speech, and break and heal human hearts. He was an assistant instructor in drawing at FAA in 2010 while he was still a student, and was a pricipal instructor after graduation. He received the 20th anniversary 4th year scholarship from The Florence Academy of Art in 2011. Other awards include the best model study, Florence Academy of Art Mölndal 2010; Year’s best portrait, Florence Academy of Art, Mölndal 2010-11; Year’s best painting, Florence Academy of Art (Florence and Mölndal) 2010-11; Alumuni Choice best painting, Florence Academy of Art 6th Alumni Exhibition, 2012. He was a guest instructor Alpine Fellowship 2013 och 2014, winner of Ruminate Magazine’s Kalos visual art prize 2015, and received a stipend from Svenska kulturfonden for the project Första person pluralis. He has a broad interest in the arts and humanities, and has formally studied philosophy, theology, and language. He remains an eager student of the ideas that have shaped western culture.
