Death and The Skull Flower: The Paintings of Dark Artist Chet Zar - Hi-Fructose Magazine

Chet Zar is known for painting monsters, but flowers have increasingly appeared at the center of his canvases. His Skullflower series pairs vivid blooms such as hibiscus, stargazers, and sunflowers with skulls, creating an image that evokes fragrance and contrast while still focusing on life and death. The series began when Zar’s wife gave him a hibiscus from their yard; he placed it in a skull’s eye socket and later photographed the combination. After realizing he needed a square painting, he created a foot-square oil work showing a hibiscus emerging from the skull, which sold and drew strong audience interest. He then expanded the idea with Skullflower II, adding a ladybug and increasing the size, leading him to enjoy flower textures and bright colors.

"Zar's blooms-hibiscus, stargazers, and sunflowers amongst them-are so vibrant that you can instantly imagine their fragrance. Their vivid colors and pert petals might stand in contrast to the unsettling, sometimes terrifying, cast of characters that populate his work, were it not for the fact that the flowers typically appear alongside skulls. The Skullflower series, last seen at Copro Gallery in Los Angeles, is a meditation on life and death that has pushed the Southern California-based artist into a new process of painting."

"It all started when Zar's wife, Lisa, gave him a hibiscus flower from the bush in their yard. "I didn't know what to do with it. There was a skull at my desk, so I stuck it in the eye socket just to hold it. That was it," he says. Zar snapped a photo of the hibiscus and the skull with his phone, then proceeded to forget about the picture."

"Months later, he realized that he needed to make a square formatted painting for The BLAB! Show. The original "Skullflower" is a foot-square oil painting of a hibiscus popping out of the eye socket of a skull. The flower's large, yellow petals gently obscure most of the skull's facial features. When Zar posted the finished work to social media, the response was immense. "People just loved it," he recalls."

"That first skullflower, which did sell, was technically a study. So Zar went ahead and made "Skullflower II," similar to its predecessor, but larger in size and with the addition of a tiny ladybug crawling up a petal. It turned out that both the artist and his audience dig flowers. "I never was interested in painting flowers. It just hadn't occurred to me," Zar says. "But there's so much cool texture in there and I really enjoyed working with these bright colors, which I don't normally do.""

Read at Hi-Fructose Magazine - The New Contemporary Art Magazine