William Zehngut

William Zehngut was born in 1939. His parents left Vienna after the Anschluss and he spent his early childhood in Zurich, Switzerland. A charged instability runs through Zehngut’s landscapes, a trait that perhaps issues from his childhood experiences in the chaos of Europe during the Second World War. Also, one can’t deny the artist’s romantic affinity for nature’s forms. Is this a sublime reflection of his viewing the powerful Swiss Alps before coming to America at age seven?
As Zehngut grew up in New York City, Manhattan’s architecture became the stage for his drama of light and color, form and feeling. He attended the High School of Industrial Art (now High School of Art and Design) with a major in cartooning. He began painting at age 27, while driving taxis and buses for a living.
During the 1980s he belonged to a group of artists in New York called the Street Painters. Primarily interested in depicting the city environment of the time, they painted outside and exhibited together. It was during this exciting period that Zehngut’s Manhattan images reached a level of personal maturity.
In 1997, he moved to the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania and spent ten years there with his family. He was inspired by the natural beauty of the area – the altered horizon, a different light, earth tones, and lush greenery. The dozens of landscapes to follow continued his commitment to fusing subject and object, creating emotional statements in paint.
In addition to his cityscapes and landscapes, portraiture has always been of interest. From many figure drawing sessions in his early days, the personal calligraphy he developed was then used to depict the expressions and emotions of his sitters. One sitter commented that he exhibited an “assured ease” as he completed a fully realized work in a matter of hours.
In all of his work, there is a common theme of beauty, drama, and optimism.