Zio Ziegler, 27, creates art with the urgency of a man who’s done the math and realized the
60 or 70 years he has left are barely enough. He often works 14 hours a day, seven days a
week, creating 600 drawings, 250 paintings and 30 murals a year. “I make a lot of paintings
because I don’t want to do anything in this world that is not absolute,” says Ziegler, stand-
ing in front of a half-finished painting based on Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of St. Peter in his
Mill Valley studio. “I don’t want to be an OK painter. I don’t want to make an OK painting.”
Ziegler runs little risk of that. “There’s nobody like Zio,” says Torrey Cook, owner of
Artists Republic 4 Tomorrow Gallery in Laguna Beach. “He’s hyper-intelligent and has
a different process from some artists. Zio just lets the emotion pour out. He looks at the
canvas, feels something, and lets it go.”
His large canvases ( 6 by 8 feet, usually) are filled with primitivistic and cubist images that
echo pop art, Picasso and Dubuffet. They also make oblique references to Ziegler’s widely
ranging intellectual interests, from Byzantine art to Schrödinger’s cat to the novels of Don
DeLillo, knowledge he often absorbs through the audiobooks he listens to while painting.
His murals — where he really “lets it go,” preferring, he says, “to be told what to paint
by the wall” — are also exuberant testaments to his rich mind. He paints these black-and-white works, which can be found in Tokyo, Milan and the headquarters of Facebook, in a
matter of hours, always without a plan. His art can also be found on sneakers — just this
year, Vans came out with a shoe that is covered in one of Ziegler’s mural-like designs. One
of his favorite murals resides on a wall of the gym at the Branson School — where, ironically, Ziegler attended high school and was kicked out of his only art class.
Ziegler has tried to live in New York, doing the urban artist gig. “But I keep coming
back to Marin to be grounded and close to nature,” says the Mill Valley native, whose
parents — successful in both business and the arts — encouraged his creativity. “I paint
from a larger inspiration, which is the natural world and the human condition. Those
are t wo things that populate me thoroughly here.”
ZIO ZIEGLER
