Midway artist’s work to be featured at retrospective
Midway-born artist Kathleen Cochran Zimbicki sorts through some of the artwork for her exhibit, “45 Years of Color, 1970-2015,” which will run May 15 to Dec. 5 at the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art in Loretto.
Mike Zimbicki, husband of Kathleen for 60 years, displays one of his wife’s favorite paintings, a portrait of him with Pittsburgh in the background.
Meadowcroft Shelter 2012, by Kathleen Zimbicki. The artist’s son-in-law, Mark Seech, is an engineer who helped in the construction of the building. Seech and Zimbicki’s daughter, Amy, have the painting hanging in their home.
Kathleen Cochran Zimbicki’s life story could be a movie.
Red-headed, small-town girl performs as one-sixth of a family singing group, eventually rejecting music to pursue her artistic passion. She marries and has children, becomes the protégé of a famous painter and eventually makes a name for herself in the cutthroat art world.
While all of that is true, the real-life version is a bit more circuitous than the storyline suggests.
“Art has been my life,” Zimbicki said.
The teacher and art advocate, who was born in 1934 in Midway, will show her work in a retrospective exhibition, “45 Years of Color, 1970-2015”, from today to Dec. 5 at Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Loretto.
“Having your work in a museum is special,” said Zimbicki, who had paintings in the Carnegie Museum of Art and Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. “It is an honor.”
Coming of age in small-town Midway was fun, and maybe even a little rowdy.
“A lot of people considered it wild then. We could wear pants,” she said of the progressive choice during a time when most schools mandated only skirts for females.
Previously named Little Egypt, Midway got its name from being the midpoint railroad stop between Pittsburgh and Steubenville, Ohio.
Although Zimbicki admits there wasn’t much as far as entertainment, “It was a fun town to grow up in.”
The family living room was austere: paneled wood walls adorned with black-and-white prints of Beethoven and Bach and all manner of instruments. When the classical music hour came on the radio, she and her siblings knew to be quiet.
“It was music all the time. I wanted a living room like my girlfriends, with cheap prints and itchy blue couches … Then I grew up and realized what a great childhood I had.”
With her siblings and father, she performed as the Cochran Family Singers, singing and playing various instruments around the region.
Her brother, Charles Cochran, who passed away in 2007, would go on to become a respected Nashville pianist who performed and wrote music for the Bobby Vinton Orchestra, Johnny Cash and Garth Brooks, among others.
“They were all good,” Zimbicki said of her siblings. “I was the worst one. Being in a competitive family, I got into art.”
Always artistic, she recalled drawing “fashion women” at about 8 years old. Throughout school, she was the go-to girl for sign-making and illustrating.
Eschewing a college scholarship, Zimbicki went to work and planned to marry a man who was going to become a Presbyterian minister. Then, she met Mike Zimbicki.
“I remember telling (the Presbyterian minister), ‘I’m going to smoke and drink.’ I would have gotten him fired immediately.”
Zimbicki’s connection to Mike was instant.
“We’re totally opposite but we love each other,” she said, calling into the adjacent living room to her tranquil husband of 60 years. “Don’t we love each other?”
“Yes,” Mike gamely, if stoically, replied.
A Korean War veteran and retired millworker, he played soccer for the Heidelberg Soccer Club, of which he is now a Hall of Fame member.
“He was famous,” Zimbicki said of her husband’s soccer skills. “He fought with the referees.”
The rabble-rouser of a young man is a sharp contrast to the calm Mike of today. He takes his wife’s jabs with raised eyebrows and some comebacks of his own.
Zimbicki recalled her April 4 birthday, when she turned 81. Her friends bought her a birthday cake and a stranger gave her an orchid. Mike, she said, didn’t even say ‘Happy Birthday.’
“I’m old now. I’m 85. I forget,” Mike said.
A frequent subject of his wife’s paintbrush, Mike proudly displayed his favorite image: he is shirtless, hands clasped behind his head, the city landscape in the background.
Once, in a not-so-subtle hint, Zimbicki painted him surrounded by a lawnmower and tools.
“He was sleeping, as usual,” she said, emitting in infectious laugh. “He should have been out there working.”
While raising their four children, Zimbicki took art classes around the region. She used oil and acrylic paints until her daughter drank turpentine.
“She was fine, but that’s when I switched to watercolor,” Zimbicki said.
In the early 1970s, she attended a workshop taught by Henry Koerner, an Austrian-born Pittsburgh artist who became known for his Time magazine covers.
She studied in his Shadyside home, bringing her children, who would fetch objects like bird nests for teacher and student to paint.
“He’s been dead for 22 years and his voice still calls to me,” Zimbicki said.
Under Koerner’s tutelage, Zimbicki began “plein air” painting, a French phrase that means painting or drawing done outside.
“He was a genius. You painted what you saw,” she said.
Zimbicki admired not only Koerner’s talent, but his desire to live in Western Pennsylvania. She said Koerner chose Pittsburgh because he wanted to be somewhere with diverse people and a varied landscape.
But when an artist she admires told Zimbicki her work was too similar to Koerner’s, she changed her path.
“I thought, ‘I have to break away,’ and I started doing fantasy,” she said.
Zimbicki’s paintings are vibrant representations of what she calls “magical realism.”
Scenes from around the world come to life, saturated in movement and color.
In addition to Mike, she painted all of her children. Animals and creatures, both real and imagined, are frequent subjects.
Sometimes, Zimbicki has an idea in mind when she goes to work. Sometimes, she paints with no inclination where it will lead.
Because she paints daily, Zimbicki has accumulated a lot of work.
“All day long I straighten pictures,” Mike said as he leveled a large watercolor in their dining room.
Last year, Zimbicki created a stir in the art community when she burned some of her work at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. It was not a protest, although some interpreted it that way. She said she realized she had too many paintings when she knew off the top of her head that her treadmill could hold 75 paintings.
“People were rescuing paintings,” she said of customers who bought her paintings at greatly reduced prices at the center’s annual “yard” sale. “Some of them should have burned.”
Zimbicki teaches watercolor painting twice a week, though she will take this summer off to paint in Southern France.
One fellow traveler will be her long-time friend and student, Kathy Sickels.
“She is relentless,” Sickels said of Zimbicki. “She really cares about artists in the area.”
Sickels credits her mentor with pushing her to exhibit, something she said she would have never done.
“She wants you to have your art seen by the rest of the world,” Sickels said. “It’s her mission.”
Zimbicki’s advice to artists: “Don’t look for success so fast. It’s a long, hard journey. It’s really not a business. You should quit if you’re expecting it to pay off. It’s a labor of love. You have to treat it that way.”
In addition to paintings, Zimbicki accumulated countless accolades for her work. A member and past president of Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, she was a Pittsburgh Master Visual Artist and served on numerous art boards, including the Three Rivers Arts Festival and Pittsburgh Watercolor Society.
Honored by all of the recognition, Zimbicki said two distinctions bring her pleasure.
Pittsburgh Center for the Arts chose her as their first lifetime achievement award recipient in 2006, an honor given to only one other person.
“They don’t spread those around,” she said.
The second honor she cherishes is being selected to design costumes in 1986 for the world premiere of Pittsburgh Ballet’s “Don Juan.”
“It was a real hoot, a real treat,” she said of the experience.
Running her own gallery is another point of pride. From 1976 to 2003, she was the director and founder of Studio Z on the city’s South Side. There, she showed her work and that of other artists, helping to boost their careers with frequent well-attended shows.
Mike said he is delighted by his wife having had her work shown, and sold, in New York City.
“You are respected here when you have a show in New York. It’s a tough city,” Zimbicki said. “Art in Pittsburgh really holds up. Artists complain (about Western Pennsylvania.) I don’t. It holds its own.”
For her upcoming show, Zimbicki wanted representations of her varied styles.
From her hundreds, maybe thousands, of paintings, she and a museum curator selected 44 pieces, one of which is among her favorite works and features her son, Max, who passed away in 2009.
Zimbicki has no plans to stop painting or teaching any time soon.
She estimates she taught around 5,000 students, some of whom have gone on to teach art themselves.
“I’m very proud to think that I’ve helped somebody. It makes me feel good,” Zimbicki said. “I tell my students to reach for the highest heights. I’m competitive and I want them to be competitive.”