Norman Zammitt was a Canadian-born American artist who represented light and space art movement. He was known for his abstract huge colourful sculptures and bright colour paintings.
Background
Ethnicity:
Norman Zammitt’s father came from Palermo, Sicily, Italy and his mother was a Mohawk Indian of the Iroquois Nation.
Norman Zammitt was born on February 3, 1931, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
When Zammitt was seven years old, his family relocated to the Caughnawaga Reservation outside of Montreal. In four years, the Zammitts moved to Buffalo, New York and finally settled down in the San Gabriel Valley of Southern California. By the moment, the artist was fourteen.
Norman revealed his passion for art in his childhood. A twelve-year-old boy, he saw for the first time an oil painting by a Dutch artist in a gallery. He was fascinated by the cartoons and animation, including Disney movies, and produced his own characters for the schools’ newspapers. This artistic activity was marked by various prizes and awards.
Education
Norman Zammitt received his general education at the El Monte High School and at the Rosemead High School in California.
Later, he enrolled at the Pasadena City College but soon was obliged to interrupt his studies because of the Korean War.
Zammitt returned to his training at the Pasadena City College in 1956. At the same time, due to the fellowship he had received, the young artist learned commercial art at the Art Center School of Design. In a year, he shifted to the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California where he had studied fine art for four years. In 1961, Zammitt obtained his Master of Arts degree.
Norman Zammitt started his professional career from the military service at the United States Air Force in 1951 where he had worked as a photographer for four years during the Korean War, including a one-year stint in Korea. In his free time, Zammitt continued to paint. When he came back from Korea, he finished his service as a draftsman in Colorado.
The beginning of Norman Zammitt’s artistic career can be counted from his collaboration with the Felix Landau Gallery in Los Angeles which started in 1960. Two years later, he had his debut solo show at this art place where he demonstrated his early canvases, mostly landscapes, made with oils and other mediums. He also participated in a couple of group exhibitions in Pasadena Museum of California Art. Due to the help of Landau, the young artist opened his first studio located in Pasadena.
In 1963, Zammitt began to teach at the University of New Mexico, the University of Southern California and the University of California in Los Angeles. He had devoted eight years to this activity. Zammitt’s art of the early 1960s reflected the elements common for assemblage, the style of Magritte and Bacon – he used human body parts as the central object of his paintings.
Since 1964, the artist took up his first experiments with acrylic plastic resins and transparent colours that allowed him to produce the spectacular three-dimensional effects on his canvases and first sculptural compositions. These paintings and transparent glass sculptures were demonstrated to the public in Los Angeles and New York City galleries.
Thereafter, he added innovative lamination and polishing effects to his three-dimensional sculptures which made them more picturesque.
In the middle of 1970s, Norman Zammitt returned to the painting activity trying to apply his dimensional and colour technics on his canvases. The paintings of the period explored the dramatic sunset landscapes of the sky and their relationships with colour palette and light. Zammitt even inquired the mathematicians to his investigations of light and colour.
This combination of art and science remained in the artist’s artworks the following decade, like in his series of paintings exploring the colour effects of the Chaos Theory.
The top of Norman Zammitt’s passion for colour relationships and their influence on the human emotions became the large-scale installation titled Elysium which first appeared in 1996 and 1997. To produce it, Zammitt used his notable colour effects to paint the four walls of the room which became magically illuminated from the top to the floor.
Norman Zammitt spent the last period of his life by producing black and white self-portraits in which he expressed the internal conflict of the human experience.
During his career, the artist regularly exhibited his masterpieces around the United States and for several times in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
Norman Zammitt was an accomplished artist whose passion for light and space gave birth to multiple sculptural compositions which were instrumental in the development of art.
During his career, Zammitt received many prestigious awards, grants and fellowships, including Solomon R. Guggenheim fellowship and the grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
The artist’s heritage is nowadays preserved in many public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the National Gallery of Art and the Library of Congress in Washington D.C, the Los Angeles Count Museum of Art, the Otis Art Institute, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and many others. The artist's Los Angeles workshop was declared the Los Angeles Cultural site by the local authorities.
The artworks by Zammitt are very popular among the art collectors. So, his canvas titled ‘Blue Burning II’ was purchased at the Sotheby's auction in New York City in 2014 for $7,500.
Quotations:
"For most of my life I had thought a lot about the nature of colour, specifically, its sequential nature. I was drawn to it, not by a decorative or superficial attraction to design and its aesthetic application but by something deep within the colours themselves, akin to life itself, spirituality."
"The artist’s first responsibility is to his own truth. For me, art is a responsibility to myself, to my own sincere thoughts. To keep in contact with that is a constant struggle. […] To recreate an old form or create a new form is not necessarily the most important concern. Form should be a result, a sincere statement of integrity; form happens as part of a desire to make a statement straight from the heart. Form seems to always be there, and the need to express it becomes stronger and stronger. Each expression does not slowly exhaust the source, but on the contrary, the artist cannot keep up with what he has to say. […] For me, this has become a way of life. I never planned it to be this way, but I am glad about it. Nothing else makes me feel more right, more my own self."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"Zammitt crafted meticulous bands of colour in subtle gradations and shades in his paintings." Los Angeles Times
"[Zammitt] translated the light and landscape of California to paint. He wanted to include the more spiritual aspects of the California landscape in his work." Carol Eliel, an art curator
Connections
Norman Zammitt married Marilyn Jean in 1955. The family produced one daughter Dawn Zammitt Crandall and one son, Eric Zammitt. The artist’s children followed their father’s steps and chose the artistic career. Dawn works as a designer of jewellery and Eric exercises the profession of a sculptor.
