Brooklyn-based painter Zachary Lank is inspired by the past while looking to the future. His work explores masculinity, absence, and the spirituality of the everyday, drawing on memory, myth, and classical technique to render scenes that are at once tender and unsettling. “I am reaching back and communing with the heritage of the craft without being married to revanchist orthodoxy. I want my roots intact, but I am seeking fresh air,” Lank says.
Lank’s painting St. Sebastian is part of his second solo show, “Revenant Blues,” at Hawk + Hive in Andes, which runs from August 2 to September 7 with an opening reception on Saturday, August 2 from 12 to 6pm.
The subject of St. Sebastian has long been irresistible to artists. In Christian iconography, Sebastian is the beautiful martyr, tied to a tree and pierced with arrows, an emblem of suffering and endurance. His image has also taken on a potent secondary life as a queer icon—his youthful, often semi-nude body evoking eroticism as much as sanctity in the work of artists from Guido Reni to Egon Schiele.
“He’s almost always depicted as this supple, beautiful youth, the arrows carrying both insinuation and the terrible violence of his death. As a queer person, I both identified with and was horrified by it. The reasons for his martyrdom and his secondary signifiers as a queer art icon blurred and blended for me; one replaced the other in a way,” Lank says.
In Lank’s version, the martyr is rendered headless and fully clothed—a figure both present and absent, severed from classical formality and set instead in a landscape drawn from memory. The backdrop is a pastoral scene suggestive of the Hudson River School, but also of Saturday morning cartoons. Earthy tones meet comic surrealism. The familiar becomes uncanny.
“I spent a lot of time roaming the orchards and forests around the farm,” Lank says of his grandparents’ apple farm in central Virginia. “Their orchard becomes Eden, the tree both an everyday Macintosh and the Tree of Knowledge. Sebastian and the serpent share their colors; they are both agents of the forbidden, doomed for being who and what they are. It’s a rendition of the stories purposefully blurred.”
Lank’s process is rooted in traditional techniques. “Every piece starts with a sketch on paper or canvas. I’ll develop it until I’m pleased with the composition and then move on to doing small studies in greyscale and then color to make the most impact in terms of shape and contrast. Sometimes something special happens, and I get the full picture beamed into my head. Then it’s getting pen and paper as fast as you can to jot it down before you forget. It’s like a ghost showed you their cheat sheet, but you’re copying it from a dirty slide projector. Once I’ve settled on something, I’ll paint it on a toned canvas in grisaille, and then finish with layers of color. It’s a very old-school method of working, but really so much of it is improvisation that I never get bored. More or less all of my work is done out of my head from imagination, pulling reference occasionally here and there when I can’t quite remember what something looks like. It’s quite the challenge!” he says.
Lank first discovered the Hudson Valley art scene through Instagram, after seeing work by Emily Pettigrew showing at Hawk + Hive. “I’m fortunate to be working at a time when there are so many other artists that are really invested in the craft of their work, particularly painting. I am eternally grateful. Praise to the muses!” he says.
“Revenant Blues”
Through Sept. 7
Location: Hawk + Hive, 61 Main Street, Andes
Hawk + Hive
This article appears in August 2025.
