Whether it was her exhibition titled "Oil” at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (SLOMA) in 2014 or "California Crude” at the Bakersfield Museum of Art (BMOA) in 2015, Kuzana Ogg has proved that "It takes the eye of an artist to find beauty in the oil rigs that line the roads into Bakersfield (in California)… With layers of color and texture, Ogg creates lustrous canvases based on the symbols depicted in piping and instrumentation diagrams from the oil industry,” notes the SLOMA website.
As Ogg conveyed in an interview with The Bakersfield Californian, "I was really fascinated, just amazed to see all the machinery integrated with living spaces” in Kern County when she moved to Bakersfield with her husband Wade who works for Chevron. Ogg who has traveled the world and exhibited internationally mentioned that she was not only inspired by the pumpjacks (the overground drive for a reciprocating piston pump in an oil well) that seem to spring up anywhere and everywhere around town, but also the other features associated with her husband’s oil industry work. Her use of color, geometric shapes and lines are evocative of machine parts, equipment and other mundane objects. She was candid: "It doesn’t really matter what the viewer sees… I want them to see what they bring to it.”
Kuzana Ogg and her paintings (above, from left) Cabbage and Lettuce in the film Southpaw;
Bahar in My All American; (2nd row) Nowruz from the "Yasna" series
Since Ogg frequently paints in series, in addition to oil rigs, her bold canvases have reflected the themes of botanical and biological entities, urban geometry and pattern. She is also "in the process of creating a large body of work, collectively titled ‘Yasna.’ This work is about the act of worship and has been titled with Avestan words regarding rituals, holidays and hymns in our Zoroastrian religion. There are 14 paintings in the collection so far and another 11 will be online by late July,” Ogg conveyed to Parsiana. "In this series ‘Yasna,’ the paintings share a randomly marked base layer. Subsequent thin layers of drips, splashes and abrasions create an implied texture… The layering of color and attention to stroke produce a lustrous and complex surface open to interpretation,” states a link to her website kuzanaogg.com
Two years earlier when The Blue Man Group unveiled their new outdoor art gallery in Chicago, Ogg’s artwork was on display. It was among the six winning pieces chosen as part of a nationwide art competition.
Giving Parsiana an update on her recent accomplishments, Ogg wrote, "My paintings will also be featured in three upcoming Hollywood films: My All American, Southpaw and Me, Earl and the Dying Girl. As explained by her, "an art director comes to the gallery (whether the Boxheart Gallery in Pittsburgh or Wally Workman Gallery in Austin, Texas) to select paintings for the sets of a movie and the gallery rents them out.”
Born in Bombay to Ketayun and Adi Pandole, after a childhood spent surrounded by lush gardens and coconut groves, she moved with her family to England, then back to India, later to New York City until marriage led her to South Korea, where she taught English, before returning to the United States (see "Kuzana’s kaleidoscope,” Zoroastrians Abroad, Parsiana, May 21, 2012). As she explains in the artist’s statement on her website, "The general pandemonium of Bombay in the early 1970s serves as a visual alphabet. Through my travels and migrations, this alphabet continues to recombine, developing into a painterly language. In any form of communication, I have found the principles of restraint and balance to be the most formidable and eloquent.”