“I strive to create imagery that has a quiet, simple strength, work that has the ability to invoke inner questioning—visual koans. I make use of monolithic forms, totemic images, and the reverence man imbues into the space around them. It is my goal as an artist to create an experience in a universal work of art whereby the quality of my viewers’ lives is bettered as a result of their interaction with my work.”
Ignorance, violence, human rights violations, and the high human costs of war have informed Zenon Duda’s life as a physician, and now inform his career as an artist. Zenon’s sculpture, paintings, music, writings, and personal lifestyle, reflect his deep convictions to help improve life on this planet.
The son of immigrants from Ukraine, Zenon Duda was born in America. His older brother was born in a refugee camp before the family emigrated to the US in 1951. Growing up in America, Zenon became well acquainted with war, hunger, and oppression hearing his parents’ stories about horror at the hands of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.
Although those bitter experiences occurred before he was born, Zenon grew up during the war in Vietnam which claimed the lives of some of his older brother’s friends, men he had put on pedestals, his protectors and friends. To see them die affected Zenon deeply. And to learn later that the Vietnam conflict was essentially pointless only fueled his determination to do whatever he could to change the conditions that allow such tragedy.
“As a son of refugees, my entire family has been intimately connected to ‘the war experience,” Zenon says. “Although I never knew it growing up, we all have the right to life, and to live in freedom and safety.”
