The artist Dennis John Ziegler was born on March 27, 1948 in Grand Forks, North Dakota, a small university town located on the windswept high central plains, an outpost closer to Canada than to the big city of Fargo. His father, Conrad Joseph Ziegler, was a law student at the University of North Dakota at the time of Dennis’s birth. Conrad worked two jobs while completing law school on GI Bill benefits earned by crawling up Omaha Beach in Normandy under constant machine gun fire and enduring heavy combat in places like the Battle of the Bulge and the Arden Forest. Dennis’s father endured this incredibly violent background experience just a few years years before the artist was born. Conrad became a lawyer, district attorney, and judge in his long legal career in North Dakota. Dennis’s mother Ann was a farm girl from nearby Crookston, Minnesota. She raised ten children with husband Conrad. There was never enough time for anything except work and duty for the parents, but somehow their own unrequited love of culture, travel, art, and music (Ann played one or two real mean ditties on the piano) was obvious to the children, despite the long hours the parents spent securing necessities and the limited opportunities for young children with artistic inclinations. If Dennis’s mother were alive today, she might explain that she pushed the crayons at him to keep him from driving her nuts. There was no Ritalin back then, and only two channels on the television.
Dennis is the oldest of 10 children, the untimely placement of which caused great expectations of him by his parents, with few or none of those expectations running in the direction of him becoming an artist. The tensions involved in the rich drama of his childhood, some of them resolved or partially-resolved and some of them still in tatters, are apparent in many of his works. He began drawing and sketching from the first time he discovered pencil and paper. It was love at first sight. This early powerful affinity has never left him, despite detours into many other directions. Creating original artworks has been his great consuming passion for six decades. Dennis classifies himself as a Folk Abstractionist. In moments of self-effacement, he refers to his drawings as “advanced doodling.”
After graduating from high school in 1966, Dennis surprised everyone by going for a stint in the U.S. Army. He became an Army medic, and was stationed in Germany for two years. He returned to the U.S. after his time in the military and made his way to San Francisco (hey, it was still the 1960’s), where he worked in various construction and finish carpentry jobs to support himself while he got back to the business of his education. He also found time, despite working and studying seven days a week, to perform at a San Francisco playhouse run by followers of George Gurdjieff, a man whose philosophy continues to influence the artist today. Dennis attended the University of California-Berkeley in the 1970’s, studying history, art, and philosophy. When he finally received his degree from Berkeley many years later (the delay being just another long and strange story in the life of an eclectic personality), he graduated Summa Cum Laude.
He met a girl in San Francisco while working at the theater, and Barbara and Dennis married in 1976. They had one child, a boy named Sebastian, born in 1978. Dennis and Barbara moved to New Jersey near Barbara’s original home to raise their son, but were later divorced. Fast forwarding, Sebastian and Barbara have lived in California for much of the last 10 years, and Dennis lives in virtual seclusion in rural New Mexico. Dennis’s devotion to art is matched only by his devotion to Sebby.
Dennis supported himself with construction and finish carpentry work until he retired in 2010 to devote himself entirely to his art. He has exhibited a handful of his 3000+ original drawings and 350+ oil paintings in local exhibits in recent years, but is otherwise unknown. His efforts to expose his work to the public have been minimal, indeed, in stark contrast to the phenomenal energy he pours into his work. Like that young boy who fell in love with the first color markers and sketch pads he ever laid eyes on, Dennis today does not really want to do much of anything except create. (Yes, the typical eccentric artist — he shrinks from the idea of commercialization). Very recently, friends and family who admire his work have begun efforts to help expose his work to the art world. This site represents the first part of those efforts.