Arnie Kozak, born 1963 in New York City, is a contemporary abstract acrylic and mixed media artist living and working in Asheville, North Carolina USA amidst the Blue Ridge Mountains. Kozak is currently on the Collections Committee of the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. During his college years at Tufts University he minored in Fine Art, taking courses at the School for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, USA. More recently he received an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. He has been a practicing psychologist, psychotherapist, university instructor, workshop leader, and author with a focus on mindfulness, metaphor, and the limitations imposed by language on experience. During his career he developed a unique form of journaling that writes over itself (called Story Art) that provides more anonymity than standard journaling, emphasizes the impermanence of experience, and in the process creates something artful—an intricate pattern that is no longer language. Story art and a grounding in psychology inform his art: abstract landscapes that incorporate Story art journaling, which provides a rich texture, upon which the general contours of close-up cropped landscape photographs (that Kozak has taken) are rendered in non-literal colors—they are not recognizable as landscapes. Each work explores the question: how can the world be experienced with the least amount of interference from the mind? Each piece also recognizes that no landscape is untouched by humanity. There are always limitations imposed on perception by the mind itself—even when concentrated, perception is influenced by past experience, conceptual commitments, and current mood. It is impossible to have a pure perceptual experience and the challenge of such has motivated meditation practitioners for millennia. Meditation can bring one closer yet never all the way to an unadulterated perception. As a meditation practitioner, teacher, and author, his life has been a conversation between the perceived and the perceivable, the elusive and evanescent moment of contact, and the attempt to capture the awesome presence of stone landscapes from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the walls of the Grand Canyon, and to other lesser known landscapes including Bandolier National Monument in New Mexico, Snow Canyon in Utah, and Chino Canyon in California.

Kozak’s oeuvre explores the relationship between word and lived experience as reflected in stone-rich landscapes. The work starts from rock formation photographs (taken by the artist) from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Grand Canyon, abstracting them in an attempt to close the gap between image and perception. It is impossible to look at the landscape without the mind being active: interpreting, comparing, liking and disliking, talking over, or being distracted. Words are always in the rocks. No landscape—anywhere—is unaffected by human activity: every molecule of air has a human fingerprint comprised of pollution and the consequences of climate change. Sometimes the words take the form of calligraphic marks that are also in the rocks or are superimposed on them—just as meaning imposes itself on perception. By not attempting to represent the landscape literally, the work seeks to undo the illusion that the landscape is pristine. No such place exists any longer. The work starts with an underlayment of a narrative process that writes over itself—reflecting the activity of the mind and the separation that stands between the world and its perception, blurring the boundaries between the organic and the constructed. The abstracted landscape is superimposed on this narrative understructure of rich texture showing how the mind struggles to meet experience on its own terms. The resulting work incorporates reality and randomness, control and chaos. Kozak was selected for the student summer show at the School for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and he has shown his work at the Helen Day Arts Center Members Show in Stowe, Vermont and The Art Hop in Burlington, Vermont. His work is in a number of private collections. He will be doing a live art performance for the Durham Art Guild in August and September of this year.