Wayne Zavosky Dancer in Arabesque Penchée, Umber and White on Canvas, Signed and Dated 1979

The Piece

A dancer folds forward from the hip while one leg sweeps up behind her into a long arabesque penchée, her skirt falling from it in deep diagonal folds. Her hands are pressed palm to palm at the chest, white flowers are tucked at her temple and gathered at the bodice, and her face, seen in profile with the eyes lowered, is that of a mature performer. It's painted in just two colours, burnt umber and white, over a ground of grey dry-brushed onto white, and nearly half the canvas is left open.

The face and hands are built in flat, firm blocks of dark and light, the way a photograph translates into paint, while the drapery is laid in with fast, loaded strokes and left alone. The whites stand slightly proud of the weave in the flowers and the highlights of the skirt. It's a single, considered composition by a painter who could draw.

History & Provenance

Signed and dated at the lower right, Zavosky 79', in the same umber used for the figure, so the signature went on while the palette was still out. The date carries a small habit of the hand: the apostrophe comes after the numerals rather than before them.

We attribute the painting to Wayne Zavosky, a California realist painter and illustrator. He came up on the San Francisco Peninsula, studying at Foothill College, showing at the Palo Alto Main Library in 1968 and winning a painting prize there in 1969, and by 1971 the Los Angeles Times was singling out his realistic-poetic paintings. In September 1974, living in Culver City, he was the featured speaker at the Culver City Art Association, described as a painter whose emphasis was on realism, a contributor to American Artist magazine and the illustrator of a new book. In 1983 he was credited as a prop builder on a Columbia Pictures feature. Zavosky is one of the rarest surnames in America, and he is the only painter of that name in any record we have found. The full research file, with every newspaper source, is on the Wayne Zavosky artist page.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Two colours and a great deal of open space make this one of the easiest paintings in the room to live with, and one of the hardest to stop looking at. The umber sits beautifully with walnut, leather, linen and aged brass, and the pale ground reads as calm on a white or plaster wall. It wants a little breathing room: over a console, at the end of a hallway, or on its own above a bed, where the long diagonal of the leg can carry across the wall.

It's also a painting with a story attached: a signature that sat unidentified for a year before the archive gave it back its painter.