“Lets Attack” by Adolph Zimmermann III

Adolph Zimmermann paints mostly from memory. “I grew up with two younger brothers and a younger sister,” he says. “In winter, we’d be out after school, ice-skating or tobogganing, or playing in the snow. In the summertime, we’d have canoes or rowboats to play with, do a little sailing and go out turtle hunting. All those things that I had fun doing as a child, are the things I like to paint.”

Many of Zimmermann’s oil paintings show three or four children playing. Each captures the action at a vital moment. Four boys throw snowballs at each other in You Can’t Hit Me. In Just Stupid Cows two cows startle some boys. Home Soon portrays a girl pulling a little boy on a sled. Zimmermann’s titles help the viewer fill in the blanks—the before and after that surround the moment captured in the painting. This gives Zimmermann’s work a compelling narrative energy.

Zimmermann grew up in Sparta, NJ. During his childhood, Sparta was largely a lake community that people flocked to during the summer months. Zimmermann’s parents had a house right on Lake Mohawk. His father owned an exterminating business. “I’m not coming from an artistic environment at all, where people are creative,” Zimmermann explains. “My mother had a sense for color and design, which you can see in her house, but she was busy raising four children.” Making art was something Zimmermann learned to appreciate in school. “I was not too good at all the other things in school,” he says, “ but the art work seemed to get me some recognition, so I just kept doing it. When I went off to college, I majored in fine arts.”

In college, Zimmermann did a lot in painting. His minor was architecture. He was an adventurous student. “I’ve taken almost every course they could possibly offer in the arts. I took some photography, printmaking, metal casting. At Montclair State, I took a course in textile design. It was the best course I’ve ever had. It was me and about 18 girls.” After college, Zimmermann moved to Colorado, where he painted some, met his wife, and soon started to work as a builder.

Today, Zimmermann again lives on Lake Mohawk in Sparta. He makes his living as a builder and house designer, a profession he thoroughly enjoys. “My homes are a kind of Norway Tudor style, not your conventional vinyl-sided home,” he says. “I’m known for remodeling the older homes from the late 1920s and 30s, taking a very small home and bringing it up to a 3 or 4 bedroom house.” When Zimmermann’s son and daughter were still little, he salvaged parts of the old homes he was remodeling and built a playhouse with an arched window and a vaulted ceiling in their backyard. Now that his children are heading off to college, he is using the playhouse as his studio.

Zimmermann doesn’t find it easy to juggle his work as a builder and his art. As passionate as he is about painting, he is worried about the time it takes away from his career as a builder. “I have a fear of being successful as a painter. I know I have to spend so much time doing construction and the building to earn an income. At the same time, when I paint, I have a hard time working in intervals. I have to see my paintings through to completion. Once I get on a roll, time means nothing. All of a sudden, I see lights flashing in the main house, and it’s my wife at three o’clock in the morning, telling me to come back into the house.”

Part of the challenge Zimmermann sees in being a “part-time” artist is the effort it takes to clearly define his style. “Some of my work can get a little too impressionistic. I really loved the piece that was in last year’s Prallsville Mills show [You Can’t Hit Me]. There is a point where it’s a realistic style but it still has a slight impressionistic feel to it. I’m still working on it, and I find myself getting better at it. The more I paint, the easier it becomes, but if I have a period where I’m not painting a lot, I kind of fall back.”

Most of this winter, Zimmermann designed a house he wants to build in Colorado. In the little time he has had to paint, he tried a new subject matter. “I did a scene of exotic dancers, go-go girls, something like Tulouse Lautrec. One is of a girl dancing, and all the guys in the go-go bar have their hunting clothes on. It’s called ‘Deer Season Opens.’ Another is called ‘Drunkard’s Dream.’There is a guy sitting down in a woodsy scene along a brook, and there are four semi-clothed women around him, and they are sharing a bottle of wine. I guess it was inspired by Manet. “The nude scenes are a depar-ture from the way Zimmermann used memory in his previous work. They are fantastic, dreamlike, grown-up and even a little provocative. But they still tell a story in much the same way his children’s portraits do.

Zimmermann enjoys coming to the monthly Artsbridge programs, especially to Artshare. “I don’t have a tight arts community up there in Sparta,” he says. “That’s why I come all the way down here. I need that feedback, the back and forth with other artists. And seeing what everyone else is doing energizes me and helps to motivate me.” Adolph Zimmermann is represented by the Nagy Gallery on Bridge Street in New Hope.