Michael Mazur
Born 1935, New York, NY, lives and works in Cambridge, MA
Mind Landscape, After Chao Meng-fu, 1994, oil on canvas, Museum Purchase, 1996.95
Throughout his extensive career Michael Mazur has often addressed themes of nature, working in a variety of media including prints, drawings, sculpture, and painting. Though he began painting in a realist style in the mid-1970s, over time, his landscapes became increasingly metaphorical and more abstracted as in Mind Landscape, After Chao Meng-fu. The painting's soft color palette and thin drips of paint are directly inspired by Mazur's profound interest in Chinese scroll-painting, specifically, the work of Chao Meng-fu (1280-1368), a Yuan dynasty master of landscape. The evocative painting captures a mood as much as a particular place and represents a loosening up of the artist’s painting style. In 1998, DeCordova and the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College co-organized the exhibition Branching: The Art of Michael Mazur.
