Life & Death: The Skull Flower Paintings of Dark Artist Chet Zar
Chet Zar is best known for painting monsters, but over the past few years, flowers have been creeping to the center of his canvases. Zar’s blooms—hibiscus, stargazers, and sunflowers amongst them—are so vibrant that you can instantly imagine their fragrance. Their vivid colors and pert petals might stand in contrast to the unsettling, sometimes terrifying, cast of characters that populate his work, were it not for the fact that the flowers typically appear alongside skulls. The Skullflower series, last seen at Copro Gallery in Los Angeles, is a meditation on life and death that has pushed the Southern California-based artist into a new process of painting.
It all started when Zar’s wife, Lisa, gave him a hibiscus flower from the bush in their yard. “I didn’t know what to do with it. There was a skull at my desk, so I stuck it in the eye socket just to hold it. That was it,” he says.
Zar snapped a photo of the hibiscus and the skull with his phone, then proceeded to forget about the picture. Months later, he realized that he needed to make a square formatted painting for The BLAB! Show. The original “Skullflower” is a foot-square oil painting of a hibiscus popping out of the eye socket of a skull. The flower’s large, yellow petals gently obscure most of the skull’s facial features. When Zar posted the finished work to social media, the response was immense. “People just loved it,” he recalls.
That first skullflower, which did sell, was technically a study. So Zar went ahead and made “Skullflower II,” similar to its predecessor, but larger in size and with the addition of a tiny ladybug crawling up a petal. It turned out that both the artist and his audience dig flowers. “I never was interested in painting flowers. It just hadn’t occurred to me,” Zar says. “But there’s so much cool texture in there and I really enjoyed working with these bright colors, which I don’t normally do.”
When Zar paints monsters, he works intuitively, drawing and painting the creatures that emerge from his mind largely without the use of photographic references.
TO ME, THE ONES THAT I INTUIT ARE WAY BETTER THAN THE ONES THAT I TRY AND COME UP WITH FROM AN INTELLECTUAL STANDPOINT, BUT THE MEANING IS STILL THERE, I JUST DON’T KNOW IT UNTIL AFTER THE PAINTING IS DONE USUALLY.”
For the Skullflower series, he setsup a photograph to have a reference for both the objects and lighting. He then replaces the background with a black one and projects the image onto a panel. “That’s a fun change for me at this point because I’ve been doing this more improvisational stuff my whole career, so it’s nice to have these restrictions and reference to look at,” he says.
Zar also needed to adjust his ordinarily muted color palette for the Skullflower paintings. While yellows, oranges, pinks, and reds have appeared in his work before, they were often used in a much more subdued way, either in the background or as small accents. The skullflowers, though, come to life through vivid colors that pop against pitch black backgrounds.
He recalls painting “Stargazer” with its mix of purples and pinks. “I had to buy a bunch of magentas and these red-purples because I had never even gone there before,” Zar says. “Then I had to figure out how to use them and how they change when you add white to them. There are all these technical things that I know inside and out about most other colors, but not these really bright colors. But that was fun. You paint for twenty… twenty-five years and you get down your process and at that point it’s fun to bring in new challenges to make it interesting.”
Sometimes, Zar works with live flowers, like in “Dead Pink Skullflowers,” which are plumerias from his yard that he initially photographed while they were fresh. Zar was intrigued by their appearance as the flowers died, though, so he photographed them again for this painting.
The process of painting the skullflowers was so enjoyable that Zar kept going with the series and the works kept selling. “As someone who is making their living only from fine art, when something like that happens, you have to take notice,” he says.
It wasn’t simply a matter of the paintings selling, the audience was interacting with the Skullflower series too. For example, Zar didn’t set out to paint flowers and skulls as a means of discussing life and death, but his audience picked up on the subtext quickly. Life & Death became the title of Zar’s 2024 solo show at Copro Gallery in Santa Monica. Several Skullflower paintings were included in it, as well as paintings of unadorned skulls and, of course, the monsters for which he is known to depict.
“I don’t really think about the meanings until after the fact,” says Zar. “I can intuit things better than I can intellectually come up with ideas. To me, the ones that I intuit are way better than the ones that I try and come up with from an intellectual standpoint, but the meaning is still there, I just don’t know it until after the painting is done usually.”
YOU ARE JUST ACCUSTOMED TO SEEING FLOWERS. I FEEL LIKE A DUMMY FOR NEVER TAKING THE TIME TO LOOK AT THEM, BUT THEY’RE SO BEAUTIFUL AND AMAZING AND WEIRD.”
His fans also began suggesting flowers for Zar to paint. One that was frequently requested was the corpse flower, known for emitting a pungent stench of death. “It seemed obvious,” says Zar. “Of course I’m going to paint a corpse flower. It’s the one flower, probably, that I would paint.”
Zar’s take on the notoriously smelly flower, though, isn’t quite what you would see at a botanical garden. In “Corpseflower,” part of the Life & Death show, a large, fuchsia flower opens to reveal a pair of long, thin arms stretched towards a storm grey sky.
When Zar looked at photos of corpse flowers, he thought of replacing the spadix (that long spike in the middle of the plant) with a pair of legs, but the visual wasn’t quite right. “That’s just too weird. It’s off-putting and just bizarre,” he says. Arms, Zar concluded, would be a better alternative. With the hands clasped together in a prayer-like motion, it added another layer of meaning, nodding back to the theme of life and death in the show. “Still, it was really weird,” Zar says of the painting. “I thought, this is going to be the one freak painting that nobody wants, but I have to paint it because it’s so cool and weird. It ended being one of the most popular paintings.”
As for his monsters, Zar is still painting those as well. While he says that he hasn’t taken a different approach to painting these characters yet, the skullflowers have prompted him to rethink color. “I’m definitely more aware of color and the power of color in a painting,” says Zar. He adds that he’s currently inspired by the way that the artist Dos Diablos, who has appeared on Zar’s podcast Dark Art Society and has exhibited alongside him at Copro Gallery, incorporates color into his work.
But the series has also prompted Zar to think more about flora, and all the textures and patterns that exist in the natural world. “You grow up around flowers and you don’t take time to stop and smell the roses,” he adds with a laugh. “You are just accustomed to seeing flowers. I feel like a dummy for never taking the time to look at them, but they’re so beautiful and amazing and weird.”*
This article first appeared in Hi-Fructose issue 73, which is available here in print.
With Halloween just around the corner, we're seeing many exhibitions exploring darker themes and subject matter inspired by the season- from new works by the Black Moon collective to "The 13th Hour" at Last Rites gallery, and even Yayoi Kusama's "Pumpkins". Among the spookiest is opening tonight at Copro Gallery; Chet Zar's "ALL HALLOWS' EVE", coinciding with their group show "Roadside Attractions" (previewed here). Lover of horror cinema, monsters, movie props and all things Halloween, Zar contributes a new body of work with some of the holiday's most popular images in his style. Glowing skulls, witches, ghosts and the mysterious unknown are all represented in these colorful 60s-inspired illustrations.