Clouds are frequent accessories in Western art. The first painters to seriously study their appearance were the Dutch landscape painters of the seventeenth century, who dramatically lowered the horizon line to make more room for the sky. Jacob Ruisdael meticulously recorded the billowing forms of cumulus clouds and the sunlight falling through them onto the flat Dutch landscape. John Constable, the founder of modern landscape painting, looked back to the Dutch model in his views of heaths and beaches. The modernist tradition of cloud imagery stems from the example of El Greco in paintings like the View of Toledo, where white haloes flicker dramatically around the edges of dark clouds, reverberating in white highlights on the buildings below.

Like Constable in his cloud studies and Stieglitz in his Equivalents series, Zimmerman focuses on the sky, omitting any trace of the terrestrial landscape. Zimmerman’s technique in these works recalls the Baroque tradition: beginning with a middle-value ground, she works up toward highlights and down toward shadows. Her drawings are informed by an understanding of what clouds actually are and what they look like as she works solely from photographs she’s taken.

The sky seems to call for a large-scale image, but the paper she prefers for pastels comes in relatively small sizes. Zimmerman has responded to this challenge by creating a series of multi-panel cloud drawings. Where the individual panels in the earlier water drawings and photo works display alternative versions of the same motif, the panels in the cloud drawings show adjacent areas of the sky, like frames in a panorama. In the larger four and six-panel works, the imposition of a cross-shaped division gives the impression that we are viewing the sky through a window. Penetrating the physical wall on which the drawing hangs.

The first Heaven’s Breath drawings were done in 2009, and the series continued until 2014. Lyall Watson’s Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind, a 1984 volume combining science and mysticism in equal measure, provided Zimmerman with the name for the series.

-Pepe Karmel, 2014

Within the array of possibilities using inks, graphite liquid, and acrylics, Zimmerman defined several different formal strategies.

For certain drawings, she begins with broad strokes of diluted ink, creating a series of horizontal lines that establish a basic pulse of light and dark in the background of the picture. Atop this first layer, she adds darker, curved strokes, creating a series of dramatic accents in the foreground. The harder, drier ink of those strokes contrasts visibly with the softer, more liquid wash of the gray strokes beneath them. Sometimes curving strokes of a damp rag create a third series of pale, translucent arcs atop the lower layers.

In another group of drawings, Zimmerman transforms her work by abandoning the pictorial drama of intersecting lines and curves, limiting herself to rows of almost purely horizontal strokes. The remarkably expressive power of these works comes from the unpredictable way the gaps open and close between the dark horizontal strokes. Light seems to shine from behind the ink, emerging sometimes as a luminous gray glow, and sometimes as a brilliant burst of white.

In a third group of works, Zimmerman creates larger drawings by using sets of small drawings composed in a grid as one piece. Riverrun, was inspired by a waterfall, with its varied currents flowing in the same direction. In each of the separate sheets, the strokes of ink move rapidly from upper left to lower right, separating and merging as they descend, but the repetition creates an effect of relentless downward motion more intense than is found in any of the individual sheets. (The same relentlessness is found in the prose of Finnegan’s Wake, which begins with the cryptic string of words: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay…”). Zimmerman’s other drawings in this series also use repetition to intensify the sense of motion: vertical in Flume, horizontal in Sluice.

-Pepe Karmel, 2014

This hot wax mixed with pigment technique has been employed from the time of the Egyptian mummy portraits (100 AD). When the wax hardened and was polished, the surface was impermeable and was meant to last at least as long as the case it adorned. The encaustic surface can be carved into, layered over and embedded with objects. In ancient Greece it was termed enkaustikos.

My travels to archeological and historic sites around the world also included visits to the small museums at many of these sites or in the local towns nearby. Many objects found during excavation, such as tools, jewelry, symbolic or ritual objects were on display and were often beautifully crafted out of stone or terra cotta.

A personal theory is that the Neolithic era, during which many of the sites I visited were created, was the start of abstraction: think of the pre-Cycladic figures from the eastern Mediterranean area or the Bird Stones from central North America made by Native Peoples, both circa 3000 BC. These examples of ancient objects struck me as ‘modern’ if not ‘contemporary’ in form. Yet they represented collective ideas from cultures long gone.

My intention was to do the equivalent of capturing these objects in amber – engrave their image in wax. The ghostly film that can be created by applying, heating and polishing the encaustic material allowed me to do just that.

– EZ, 2017

Equivalent Abstraction: Roma Window, is another dramatic pairing of photographs and drawings where the camera looks at the position of the setting sun coming through the window; but instead of the sun descending toward the horizon, it was the mullioned window that moved up and out of the picture frame.

- Pepe Karmel, 2014

The image unit upon which she based Equivalent Abstractions is a corner in an empty studio that is illuminated by two bands of light, substanceless forms that imply the unseen existence of apertures into the otherwise empty space. For the 1974 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Zimmerman installed 15 photographs of this image taken sequentially over a period of time during which the positions of the bands of light moved and their shapes changed. Directly below the row of photographs, Zimmerman installed a corresponding row of seemingly identical images rendered by hand as graphite drawings. Hung one above the other, the similar images challenged the viewer to distinguish between the supposedly 'objective' medium of photography and the supposedly 'subjective' medium of drawing.  The work as a whole presents a provocative dialogue between alternative images and the reality that they represent.

-Charles F. Stuckey, 1982

Zimmerman’s graphite drawings on mylar are predicated on interrelated regularly-shaped solids and voids. Some of these drawings represent imaginary architectural settings consisting of wall planes punctured by rectangular doors and windows, and in the drawings the light that falls across the forms generates sharply defined shadows as forms in their own right. Since the drawings are rendered exclusively in black and white, the wall planes that are shaded in half tones appear to be partially or fully transparent, and it is, therefore, impossible to decide whether a form represents wall or shadow. Just that impossibility reiterates an important aspect of Zimmerman’s works in which substance seems to masquerade as shadow and vice-versa.

-Charles F. Stuckey, 1982