“Painting allows me to safely express my emotions…”
Katina Zinner paints as if her life depends on it. She is a talent, driven and compelled to the emptiness of a canvas like a cheetah is to an antelope. A warrior artist who puts her neck on the block, Katina always manages to spin gold from flax. “Painting allows me to safely express my emotions in an undisturbed environment.” Her paintings, large, powerful and striking, reflect those raw moments. The pieces she creates are highly dynamic and viewers are magically swept up into Katina's realm.
The daughter of an Oscar-winning film editor and producer Peter Zinner and renown photographer and sculptor Christa Zinner, Katina is the product of a passionate combustible Hollywood couple with titanic creative personalities. The clash of artistic parental egos have manifested into a cougar of a daughter, an internationally known fine artist and a brilliant film editor.
“In my case, ‘tempestuousness’ serves me,”
“In my case, ‘tempestuousness’ serves me,” says the highly energized blonde tresseled Katina. This, and more, is revealed in her large and grand styled contemporary abstract oil paintings. The friction and passion in the Zinner household thrust a very young Katina into an expressive, explosive and colorful environment from day one. Her childhood was a challenge Katina met with vigor and determination. Immersed in the milieu of fame and creativity, her genetic proclivity to greatness has produced a gifted artist and her film editing has contributed to features and documentaries that have garnered Peabody and Emmy awards.
“Editing is a deliberate and meticulous art form,” Katina explains.”Though I love this medium, I always come up against an emptiness, a void that lacks the substance to satiate me.” Editing is a collaborative process where I find moments of soul on film and then build scenes around it. I need to make magic with what already exists. Painting allows me to unfurl my emotions with wild abandon.”
Her father was a gentle, bright, charismatic and extremely talented man, whose dreams of coming to America resulted in several Academy Award nominations and an Oscar victory for The Deer Hunter. To Katina, he was an emotional safe haven. In bright contrast, her mother - the iconic photographer whose celebrity and fashion shots graced the covers of Look, Life and Ebony - clashed in fiery tangles with her daughter.
“These turbulent confrontations became the springboard for my passionate expression of pain, frustration, joy and hurt,” Katina remembers. Though they lived as oil and water, the confrontations and fierceness of their relationship resulted in Katina becoming a powerful personality with a precociously free thinking mind. Young Katina visited her parents on set in Europe from the age of 6, traveling internationally unescorted by 11 and presented her first solo art show that same year. Her works of rural scenes of Italy, San Francisco and Germany were fashioned of colored inks and shown at the Lisa Burnham Gallery in Oakland, California.
“As long as I can remember, I have felt at one with nature and crave being outdoors.”
A child is never the exact prodigy of a parent, but a mysterious mix of two, a new soul with its own unique urges and destiny. As such, Katina sought respite and refuge in nature, animals and painting. She found solace in the mountains, valleys and oceans and developed a tremendous respect and amour for the natural world. “As long as I can remember, I have felt at one with nature and crave being outdoors.” These interests developed a physical prowess that inspired her to climb the mountains of Africa and Austria, as the ocean continues to lure her with daily swims that have become a ritual.
A highly energized electrical being, Katina is fiercely covetous of her freedom and time alone. It is no surprise that she thrills with the extremes and the rawness of the natural world and tranquility through her art.
Katina Zinner’s paintings hang in some of the most prominent homes in Europe, on the Malibu, California coastline and on the edge of New York City’s Central Park.
