Background
Eric Zammitt was born in 1960 in Los Angeles, California, United States. Eric’s father was also an artist that worked with plastics in the 1960s. His grandfathers were a Marvel cartoonist, and a precision “space race” machinist, respectively, and one of his grandmothers, a native Canadian Mohawk, a knitter of colorful patterned blankets.
Education
Eric Zammitt attended the Pasadena City College, where he became an Associate in Arts Degree. Then he visited courses at California State University in Los Angeles. Moreover, Eric for three years had an independent study.
Career
Eric Zammitt's always been self-employed, and never had a regular job. His intricate, geometric wall sculptures are made of tens of thousands of solid bits of boldly colored acrylic plastic, which are laminated into cohesive panels through an intensive process of construction, division, and reconstruction. This process is followed by wet-sanding and polishing. His works have been associated with energy fields, music, light and space, quantum and string theories, landscape, mosaics, weaving and genetic patterns.
Zammitt’s wall works and sculptures are constructed from tens of thousands of tiny colored acrylic plastic components, each perhaps 5mm – 6mm in size. The laborious creation process begins by taking giant sheets of colored acrylic and cutting them down to more manageable 6” x 6” squares. The colored wafers are then arranged and rearranged into from 2 to 5-foot towers until a pattern emerges that has the proper light, energy, balance, motion and sense of life in the artists mind. Eric’s process is somewhat experimental in nature; he doesn’t exactly know in the beginning what the resultant “painting” or sculpture will be, rather he lets it unfold organically over time. Next, the towers are glued together until hardened into monolithic vertical blocks.
The artist has widely exhibited throughout the United States, Japan and Korea. His works are a part of many private and public collections including the Harris Gallery, University of La Verne, California; the Museum of Art and History, Eglash Collection, Lancaster, California; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California.
Zammitt is also a master woodworker who teaches at the Art Center College of Design and could have easily been an engineer or scientist; it has to be something more. He spoke of the creative satisfaction that comes from solving technical problems precisely because they’re challenging. Given his choice of materials and their demanding physical properties these hurdles routinely present themselves.
Views
Eric Zammitt adheres to the artistic traditions of Op Art and Light and Space.
Quotations:
“My work alludes to the dynamics and interplay of dual elements; matter/energy, spirit/body, emotion/intellect. It is simultaneously about our Gestalt experience of the drama and beauty of creation, and our intellectual fascination with its parts and how they relate to create a whole.
The works are often associated with energy fields, music, quantum and string theory, weaving, land and seascapes, genetics, etc. For me, colored acrylic plastic is simply paint, but in solid form, and my “brushes” are the bandsaw, table saw, and glue.”