Zio Ziegler is a young Californian artist with an old soul. Very much a poetic painter, he recently visited London for the Uncommon Thread tour, where we caught up with him while he painted a wall for a commercial project. However much he may embrace the powers that be for funding to enable him to live his life, he remains altruistic and enlightened.

VNA: So tell us a little bit more about your work, where are you from and what kind of influences do you have in your work?

Zio Ziegler: I live in San Francisco right now, I’d say the influences in my work are early Aegean and Egyptian, hieroglyphs and work that is really linear in its creation. Art that exists for art’s sake rather than to have a dialogue with art history. It’s stuff that is to convey allegory and meaning and it comes from the subconscious. I studied painting at school, like classical painting, and there was always a really negative perception towards things without concept, it had to be concept first and then imagery afterwards. I was like “This is terrible because we all have cell phones, we’re sharing aesthetic things and you have to have some sort of aesthetic bite.” You can’t just lay a few bricks into the ground, you can’t just do that anymore as things need a sort of aesthetic punch, in order to get people interested and grab them. And then you can conceptually hold them down and deliver a message. I guess my ethos behind my work was always intuitivism. Following my intuition and my subconscious and letting the image build itself and then sitting back and observing the meaning afterwards.

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