MFA 2024 Artists MFA 2024 Artists: Zeph Luck

MFA 2024 Artists

Zeph Luck

UMass Dartmouth 2024 MFA Thesis Exhibition

About Zeph Luck

Zeph Luck’s inspiration of nature started at a very young age. He spent his earliest years living in Tidewater, Virginia playing in the ocean and the Chesapeake Bay, and then moved to a cabin in the mountains of North Carolina. His deep connection to these locations and the flora and fauna that are around him on a daily basis is the inspiration for his art. Zeph’s formal training started in high school when attending Weaver Academy for the Performing and Visual Arts in North Carolina. Next, he received his BFA in Drawing and Printmaking from UNC at Greensboro. Luck is currently a candidate for MFA in Painting at UMass Dartmouth.

Statement

In our current age of instant information and technology we have lost our sense of curiosity and wonder. People no longer find awe in everyday things. It is this part of the world that inspires my art – the quotidian flora and fauna that we see in and around our ecosystems. I believe the ecosystems we encounter each day are just as capturing as those in faraway exotic places. All we need to do is take the time to admire them.

I work in several mediums, including painting, drawing, and printmaking. However, the methods I use in creating my compositions remain consistent across them. I add, subtract, overlap, and interweave subjects until I reach a balanced composition of visual complexity. I create my images like puzzles with subjects that need time to find their way through. In this process of creating and decontextualizing them, I transform these subjects from just being animals, plants, or fungi, into something more. This invites the viewer to reconsider them and use their own lexicon to create an individual understanding of the work. Through this experience, I hope to remind the viewer to stop, slow down, and really look at the world around us.