Growing up in Granite City, Illinois on the eastside of St. Louis, David Zukas copied the drawings of his fly fishing maternal grandfather James Rideout, which was the beginning of his love for art.
Zukas continued drawing and sketching through high school, then when earning a bachelor’s at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Ill., and obtaining a master’s at Florida International University in Miami.
For the past five years, spurred by the idea of being more physical with art by his father-in-law, Haitian sculptor Patrick Vilaire, Zukas hit on the idea of painting on old doors from homes. At that same time he was painting his rendering of the famous “Door of No Return.” The door was the point from where many African slaves took their final steps from their home continent and onto the slave ships that would bring them to the Western hemisphere, if they survived the journey.
“It was a great idea, the sculptor telling me to be physical,” Zukas said. “Yeah, I’ve been dumpster diving for 100-year-old doors, or if people are remodeling their homes I ask them if they are throwing them away. It’s environmentally sound, green painting.”
Working in his basement studio, Zukas does not strip the doors, much of which have been painted in the past with lead paint. He coats them first with a latex or polyurethane seal then starts fresh. He loves oil, but mostly works in the less expensive acrylic. The images he paints comes from photographs that he has taken or other sources.