...More About the Artist

STONES HAVE VOICES | An entire language of feeling and memory has been repressed beneath rock. Hand-crafted tongues hold still, frozen for generations, yearning to speak their secrets -to discuss what they have witnessed but can not declare. 

I am more than an artist. I am an interpreter for the unvoiced. I define “stone” as abstract flesh and do not restrict the classification to minerals. Stones can be statues. Stones can be children. Every “stone” reveals itself as a hardened structure housing confined significance.

My passion obligates me to study these stones; identify their unvoiced desires, question the weight of their past -acknowledge the pressure of being forced to hold a single stance eternally. I clarify their personal history, depict details of loose emotional connections, measure, affirm and reconcile their positions. I translate the internal universe restricted within stone, to make the subjects understandable by viewers who have only stood outside with judgement and not from within with consideration; reconditioning a race of people who stare at surfaces objectively as an audience, but never dared to approach the more private inner atmosphere of stone. 

I sign each painting with two letters KZ -the first letter of my first name and the last letter of my last name because whenever I approach the canvas I am giving the totality of myself, from beginning to end. 

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The first collector I had was a commission in 2004 for $5,000 to a doctor in Oregon that specialized in women's reproductive cancer. He asked to buy a particular painting and I told him it was not for sale. When he asked why not? I replied "Because it is a piece of my soul." His response was "That's what I want from you. I want a piece of your soul!" And that is what he received. The same week a neighbor, who is the president of a firm in Orange County knocked on my door to check in on me. I lived in Huntington Beach, next to the wetlands and the ocean. My door was glass. It was covered with blinds. When I opened the door, he was shocked that I was home, as he could not see the light from outside. I was examining a painting in the dark, as I often do to detect shadow and modifications needed by me. He said he wanted to buy the painting L'Enfance that I was looking at. I politely turned him away, stating it was not for sale. The next day he came back with a 100 page book of poetry that he had written. He flipped through the pages and read a poem about his childhood and exclaimed his connection to the painting. It was only then that I agreed to sell the L'Enfance to him for $1000 because it wasn't a trophy -it was a part of his soul too. 

In the beginning, I never painted to sell. I had little stability until I gave it to myself. I began painting as a way to document the emotional context of my life. As proof of my journey. As evidence that I was here. My siblings and I, along with our mother, were houseless throughout my childhood. Due to multiples moves cross country, living in shelters on-and-off until high school, a boarding home in San Francisco -a majority of my baby photos were lost. It was as though my timeline had been erased. I had no proof that I did. I chose to challenge that perception, privately, through art. The first portrait I painted was of my older sister Eyndiyah (pronounced India) who at the time I saw as a protector and guardian for other three of us. She was both a sister and mother to me. It was the only painting I had made prior Jeanette's cold case.

I have included the complimentary publication I wrote about my practice in the early years when I was agoraphobic. I am no longer agoraphobic. I am simply private. 

I have lived a true artist's life. There are no coincidences . At the bottom of this page, I will someday include insight and stories of the personal miracles I have experienced. Like how my bonus sister and muse, Lisa Rainbolt, was diagnosed with cancer in 2018. It was a rare form of cancer that coincidentally, my first art collector specialized in. Immediately, I called him on his cellphone to learn that he had moved to Orange County and was 30 minutes away. He cleared his schedule to meet with us that day. My beloved Lisa passed away on Mother's Day 2019 but she is still with me, loving and guiding me from the other side. 

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Born in Chicago, based in Orange County/Los Angeles and Paris, I am an anomaly produced amid a mélange of systems. Displacement has been a reoccurring theme in my life. As a middle child, developmentally, and an INTP logic and intuition were activities that clarified an ever-changing external environment. I have two awards from two former presidents, George W. Bush and his father, for my longstanding commitment to the most vulnerable within our communities.  I hold an interdisciplinary degree in Art & Analysis, compounding art, psychology and computer science, from California State University of Long Beach. I was the first in my family to graduate college. I was offered my first gallery by a French businessman, whom to this day I have never met, though he changed the trajectory of my life. I was still a college student when this happened. I juggled both. 

As for the history of my practice, I transitioned to depicting the statues of Paris after experiencing an emotional fracture with the death and murder investigation of Jeanette O'Keefe in December 2001. I was researching at the Bibliothèque nationale de France at the time, in addition to my studies at La Sorbonne, where I ingested over eight thousand pages that comprised "The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud."  Consumed by a psychological paralysis, I became agoraphobic, and I began to identify with the only other presence that made sense –the statues that were petrified, frozen in a moment in time like I was.     

The statues were the only witnesses around me that I could relate to. Trauma led me to marry psychoanalytic principles to art –creating the world I needed most. The statues around me provided a sense of safety in a fragile environment where I placed the architectural background of Paris at the forefront of consciousness through observation. 

Nearly a decade later her murderers were caught. 

Being both left and right brained has served me well as an artist and research scientist. Formerly, as a self-represented gallerist of the Muizz Gallery of Newport Beach, I was able to logistically straddle two worlds at once, with one foot in business and the other grounded in creativity. 

Something I wish more emerging artists were able to identify is that as they continue to navigate this chosen path, the things they consider failures –the moments that bring them to their knees, eventually accumulate into stepping stones and turning points that will lift them up to their highest potential should they be able to sustain a recommitment to themselves. After a certain period, the evidence of this will appear as if by magic.

This is something I wish I had known. But the paradox is that the journey is one of conviction –of things believed but unseen. Now that I am no longer agoraphobic I have validated this for myself. How opportunities are not always about being the best but the most steadfast. For I have come undone and decoded enigmas while striving for renewal. I have reconciled failures and losses, and redeemed this journey through expression. I have come in contact with many marvels. I can account for myself. And above all, I am fulfilled and filled in knowing firsthand what it means to throw oneself wholly into this exceptional existence.

Be you for you.

"Being an artist means seeing things and never being able to shut your eyes."

                                                                                                                                                    --Keariene Muizz