Troy Zaushny, one of Hygienic Art Cooperative’s newest resident artists, is a professional career artist. Born and raised in rural Connecticut, his initial inclination to art was sparked by album cover art, posters and apocalyptic imagery found in religious propaganda. From his youth Troy chose subject matter from nature - animals primarily - rendering them sometimes photo-realistically, and other times abstracting them into something altogether fantastical. Attending the University of Connecticut, Troy turned his focus towards printmaking, a method he was introduced to in high school, through silk-screening t-shirts. It was the multi-layered approach to image making that drew him to printmaking. At that time, Troy gained and maintained appreciation for artists such as Albrecht Durer, Henry Rousseau, Michelangelo and Jean-Michel Basquiat, though his muse for his own personal imagery came from some thing less conventional.

As a boy, Troy discovered that certain sounds – the babbling of a brook, the drone of bees, or the electrical hum of a transformer - had a transcendental effect on him. In short, those sounds not only gave him an expanded, multi-sensory perception of the world as he knew it, but also extended his visual imagination beyond what he perceived it to be. Troy’s attempt to communicate these experiences has been the driving force behind his art works for the past twenty years. During this time he has honed his skill and, more importantly, his process. His technique matches the depth of layers of his imagination so that, finally, the artist seems comfortable with his stride.

Troy has compiled a body of work that, taken as a whole, well exemplifies the evolution of his creative vision and process. In its assembly he has managed to create, in a fashion, his own retrospective. From early wood and lino-cuts (reflections and interpretations of, then, unexplained imaginings) to his latest realized poly-frescoes, Troy has come full circle, moving from surreal abstracted imagery to more physically realistic natural subject matter; gentle reminders from an older and wiser artist of experiences common to us all, born in the quiet stillness of a natural setting, when we allow ourselves the connection to our individual and collected inspirations.

- Jonas Sanchez