On View February 4th through March 4th.
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Zachary Schomburg is a painter, poet, and novelist. A new book of poems, Wool Moon, will be published in the fall of 2026 by Black Ocean. He lives in Portland with B and Y.
zacharyschomburg.net
INSTA: @zacharyschomburg
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ARTIST STATEMENT:
Even when hands are still, like in photographs and paintings, they can look like they’re moving. They’re lovely and strange, quick and spidery, straight and round, soft and plump. They’re expressive, elegant and clumsy. They hurt you. They help you. In the last line of her poem called The Cart, Mary Ruefle says this about hands: “They hold on to things. They let things go.”
My first painting in the series, “Hand and Donkey,” is painted loosely from a photo of my own hand. It was an entirely new shape somehow, and the longer I stared at it, the harder it became for me to count the fingers. It was some trick of the eye. So I added a sixth finger to be sure. Then I wanted to paint many more hands, all with 6 or more fingers.
Most of the hands in this series were hands found in the photographs of Henri Lartigue, Vivian Maier, Alfred Stieglitz, Larry Fink, and Frida Kahlo. Images of hands that I painted that did not come directly from photographs came from B, a gracious and willing hand model with beautiful hands.
These paintings of hands are acrylic on primed canvas. This medium allows me to rework and layer an image until it surprises me with starkness. The paintings exist in their relationship with the reference photograph until they don’t, until they become something else equallly interesting—beautiful in their simplicity, strange in a newness.
May these hands hold you while you look at them, let you go when you don’t. And may you see all the hands in your life with fresh eyes, count their fingers, and be in awe of what they do.
