My life…
Here I am, living the dream.
I create art.
I surf.
I spend time with family and friends.
I live in paradise.
Color has fascinated me since I was a kid.
I remember staring at a single color long enough to notice how it seemed to shift depending on what I was feeling. Happy, sad, calm, excited—the color always looked different. I've never stopped paying attention to that.
For more than thirty-five years, I have built my paintings from scratch—constructing the stretcher frames, preparing the surfaces, and developing many of the tools I use to make the work.
What began as a fascination with color has become a lifelong exploration of intention and unpredictability—of what can happen when I create the conditions for something I cannot fully control.
Process & Technique
Every painting I create contains one or more FOLPs—Figures of Limited Predictability.
Each FOLP begins with a handmade Color Wand, designed to hold and sequence color before releasing the paint onto the surface in a single, unpredictable motion.
When the paint meets the surface, it moves according to physics rather than planning. It stretches, fractures, gathers, redirects, and settles according to flow, viscosity, momentum, and release. I guide the process, but I do not control the final form.
Before the FOLP is released, I establish an environment for it to enter. Throughout my work, these environments have included language, numbers, geometric structures, landscapes, color fields, and atmospheric spaces.
The vessel establishes the possibility. The action releases it. Chance determines the figure. The environment determines what the figure can become.
The FOLP is generally the final painted element. Once it enters the environment, the painting is essentially complete. What interests me is what happens when something deliberately constructed encounters something that could not have been fully predicted.
COLOR WANDS
I build these instruments I call Color Wands. Since 1988, I’ve made more than three dozen different versions, changing them as the work itself has evolved. They allow me to establish the possibilities without determining exactly what happens. The figure that results is what I call a FOLP—a Figure of Limited Predictability. I then place that figure into a completely different environment to see what it can become.
Home Break
Background
Thomas Zanz is a Maui-based contemporary conceptual painter whose work explores the relationship between intention, chance, and what emerges between the two.
For more than thirty-five years, Zanz has developed an evolving body of work built around the same fundamental process.
His work has moved through multiple phases, from early minimalist paintings and structured color fields to transparent linen works and installation paintings. Throughout these changes, the FOLP has remained the connecting thread across otherwise distinct bodies of work.
Working from his studio on Maui, Zanz continues to explore how the same underlying process can produce distinctly different results as the figure moves from one environment to another.