Zangara’s propensity for elevating the quotidian into something regal is perhaps nowhere more in evidence than in the floral still lifes and wetland tableaux that have become her calling cards.  Like her animal portraits, her flowers and plants are individuals, too.  She captures their élan vital with something that reminds me of the Shinto reverence for the deity within all matter, animate or inanimate.  This is an artist who possesses an uncommon insight by which she picks up vibrations in the natural world that most of us look past.  She sees the ch’i, the life force every bit as present in the botanical world as are chloroplasts, stamens, pistils, and petals.  “One of my interests,” she told me last year, “are the energies, the forces we don’t see.  Nature provides this bounty of visual, palpable sources that affect me, and I feel extremely happy that I’m aware of these things, but I also feel blessed to know there’s more happening than what we’re limited to seeing with our eyes.  I think that’s part of my technique.  I’m trying to show you those unseen forces.”

The artist’s background provides clues as to how she evolved this heightened sensitivity.  She grew up in the Bay Area in the 1950s and 60s in a house that spilled over with music (her father loved jazz and played the trumpet).  She was always singing, playing outside with her friends, and making hippie-style fashions after her mother taught her to sew.  She earned good grades in school, helped look after her younger sisters and brother, did chores, and cooked dinner for the family nearly every evening.  She was aware of design from an early age; one of her grandmothers lived in a clean-lined, modernist home, whereas her own household was appointed with Buddha statues and other East Asian arts and crafts that her father, who was in the Korean War, had sent back home; Zangara’s girlhood bedroom was decorated in a version of French Baroque, complete with a canopy bed.  The radical stylistic contrast between these living spaces intensified the aesthetic vision that was steadily evolving within her.  In addition, her mother and grandmother each had a highly attuned aesthetic eye and exacting attention to detail.  They passed down to Zangara a highly specific way of looking at fabrics, colors, textures, furnishings, and accessories.  This aesthetic focus became deeply ingrained.

When she started painting landscapes as a young adult, her parents proudly hung them among their Japanese scrolls and screens.  As her interest in art and design bloomed, she was hired on to create visual displays for Macy’s and Crate & Barrel.  From an accomplished watercolorist she learned techniques for painting in that medium, while at the same time taking night classes in art at San Jose State University, where she found herself drawn to the work of Goya, late Monet, de Kooning, and Rauschenberg.