Impressionist Paintings of Famous Zombie Films: The Apocalypse, Abstracted

George Pfau is obsessed with zombies. Earlier this year, he published the Zombie Index, a massive illustrated work that showcased hundreds of zombies, each representing a different archetype of the undead. Perhaps prodded on by the Index's blogospheric success, Pfau returned just six months later with a new project called ZombieScapes. It's a suite of abstract paintings that transform terrifying scenes from the most famous zombie films into landscape art.

It's weirdly unsettling stuff, as if Monet were doing George Romero's storyboards. Many of these scenes are pretty iconic—the black and white ghouls staggering across farmland in the Night of the Living Dead, for instance—now rendered into abstract intimations of menace on the canvas. Compare the image above with this, a screenshot from the source material:

Just like zombies, carrying the superficial characteristics of the person they used to be, these artworks carry the visual DNA of the undead cinema they're based on—no longer horrifying or grotesque, they're simply haunting figures depicted in a public space. Our memory of zombie culture is the only thing that prevents them from being ordinary landscapes. Zoom out just far enough, and we're indistinguishable from zombies.

To get the inside story on this strange immersion in zombie culture, I reached out to Pfau. Over email, we discussed the project's genesis, his obsession with the undead, and what, exactly, zombies are, anyway. I'll share his work throughout our conversation—you can view all of it here—and compare his paintings with the cinematic scenes they're drawn from.

MOTHERBOARD: This is your second zombie-related work this year. What's your obsession with zombies? 

George Pfau: I wrote my graduate thesis at the California College of the Arts about zombies, which launched me deep into the grotesque/ beautiful world of the undead. A section of this, called “Feverish Homeless Cannibal,” was recently published in a book called Zombies in the Academy. My obsession lies in “zombie” as an entry point into issues like death, contagion, survival, recognition, rights, and the blurry line that separates one person from another. I think a lot of people can relate to these topics.

What is a zombie?

The term zombie is marvelously contradictory at its core, describing life/death, individual/group, healthy/sick, autonomous/controlled, “he/she” / “it”.  Recent discussions with Josh Warren of the blog ZombieLaw have affirmed my sense that “zombie” can be defined by its use.  It can be thought of as a set of constraints or rules that is constantly shifting from one book / movie / game / news report / tweet  to another. I see "zombie" as a category that encapsulates a broad range of possibilities.

Zombies span the shambling former-loved-ones rattling prison fences on The Walking Dead, to the racist portrayals of Haitian voodoo of the '30s and '40s, to the Nigerian military according to Fela Kuti, to the queer necrophilic protagonist of Bruce LaBruce's La Zombie, to countless other iterations. Last summer the Z-word was used to sensationalize a sad story about an attack that happened on a Miami causeway.  Zombies are also labeled: walkers, ghouls, walkers, infected, skels, undead, unliving, deadites, stenches, hostiles, revenants, victims, patients, vectors of contagion, etc. To many they are sub-human others killed for sport, to others they are a race of under-recognized people seeking acceptance and rights.

Which was your favorite scene to paint? What's your favorite zombie film, TV show, or cultural product?

I love the loss of control that happens when translating from film, to digital format, to still image, to oil painting, to photograph. While it’s hard to pick favorites, the ones of the interior and exterior of the mall in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead led to a lot of unexpected color combinations, weird pinks, purples, etc. One of my favorite Romero films is Land of the Dead, for his portrayal of the zombie proletariat rising up against Dennis Hopper and his elite 1 percent enclave. I’ve got some Land of the Dead paintings in the works.

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What are you thinking about while you're painting a zombie? What's different about painting a zombie than a human?

I think of the paintings as optical devices and thus I am very sensitive to the amount of visual information necessary to connote a body, as opposed to just a blob. The zombies are often on the verge of recognition, just coming into focus.  I think of this as a fairly innocent position in which stereotypes and fears are not yet assigned. The mode of painting is inspired by Impressionist / Pointillist painters like Camille Pissarro. A recent show of his work at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, made me think more how we use our eyes to optically blend colors that are sitting side-by-side.  Zombies engender many experiences of bodies blending together or blending into their surroundings.  A zombie bites a person, crossing a physical boundary, essentially blending into that person, and shifts their identity from recognized individual to more of homogenous mass. Zombies are constantly oozing into their surroundings, bleeding, falling apart, in the way that humans are also constantly shedding skin, hair, etc. I use paint to depict this ooze.

Part of what your work reveals is that when we zoom out, there's little evident difference between zombies and people. Do you think that's true?

Yes, zombies are us. Zooming is an optical effect of great interest for me. Both projects, zombiescapes.us and zombieindex.us, incorporate this, allowing viewers to pull way out and see masses of figures blending together as a unified collective, and then zoom all the way in to the raw guts of each individual. In the zombiescapes you can even see some dandruff and eyelashes that got embedded in the paint. I tend to see the difference between a zombie and a human as about the same as the difference between a human and another human.

What was the inspiration for this series in particular, and do you think you'll continue working with the undead?

At the moment “zombie” is fucking inescapable, and thus inspiration abounds. I’ve got several other zombie projects in the works. I’ve just produced two zombie-ish videos, one featuring comedian Caitlin Gill and the other featuring singer Augusta Lee Collins. I often do a slideshow presentation called “Zombies, identified” at galleries and universities, which has been a great source of feedback for me. In doing this I have come to really believe that zombies interweave discomfort and beauty in ways that open up conversations about the most vulnerable and grotesque aspects of being human. So yeah, the zombie saga continues.