Lonnie Zarem
PAL Instructor since 2018
As an art instructor, my goal is to provide the tools and materials, techniques, especially experience, and enthusiasm to encourage students to access their personal creativity through fine art.
— Lonnie Zarem
About
Lonnie Zarem is a professional fine artist with a focus on making Encaustic Monotypes. Following art school, and several years of oil painting, she started to paint with Encaustic Wax, a medium consisting of beeswax, resin, and pigment. Soon after, Lonnie studied with Paula Roland, a master and well known encaustic artist and a true pioneer of the encaustic monotype process. This means creating an image by painting with blocks of pigmented wax on a hot flat plate, and then placing rice paper on it to absorb the waxed image, and then pulling it off for a one time print. For the last 15 years, Lonnie has been pushing the possibilities of making contemporary encaustic monotypes; developing new methods, stretching and modifying wax application, working large scale, incorporating varied drawing approaches, and exploring color to achieve her highly expressive representational abstract monotypes.
When asked what inspires her work, she said, “I have always been fundamentally inspired by my relationship with the natural world. I want to experience the special moments that arrive from being aware, when it’s most beautiful, when it’s most simple, when it’s most profound, when contrasts are arresting. I want to visually capture it in my mind before it’s gone, to register it in a pure, simple, and honest way. I look to see things raw, wild, and unbundled from the demands of daily life. It’s my intension to capture natures’ announcements of change, of transition. I am urged to respond and interpret these moments in terms of the emotion and meaning they have for me, to find these beautiful memories and make them seeable, and shareable!
Lonnie currently lives and works in her studio in Los Altos Hills, California. She was born in Southern California where she grew up playing tennis with the intention of turning professional. This led to her recruitment to UC Irvine where she graduated with a B.A. in economics. After years working as a marketing professional, she married Hal Zarem and had three sons. The family moved to Northern California in 2000, at which time Lonnie decided to formally pursue her art career. This led to art school at San Jose State University, School of Fine Arts and the many years of making, showing, and selling her work as well as being an art instructor for the last 8 years. She enjoys family, friends, and an active life filled with the wonder, beauty, nature’s wildness, and the quest for new adventures!
Artist Statement
I intend to express my observations, interactions, and interpretation of the living world around me. I mean to capture the simple, honest, and elegant moments when I feel profoundly connected to people, plants and animals and the meaningful interactions and shifts of daily life. It is my joy to share these experiences through my work.
The fluid and unstable nature of the encaustic media offers unique freedoms to explore layering, depth, line, and color all while preparing for a pull off print. This invites an energetic, physical, and immediate focus which can be dynamically expressed on rice papers. This expressive process is inherently exploratory and offers me endless possibilities to express the fundamental truths I search for.
