The latest addition to Zihua’s ever growing art community opened December 1st, Z-Town Gallery, located on the corner of Juan A. Alvarez and Agustin Ramirez.
The new Z-Town gallery is the long awaited home to local surf and landscape oil painter Peter Schworer and other local and international artists. Until now, Schworer’s work could only be seen as works in progress out on our area’s beaches and surf spots with only occasional showings in area restaurants.
Having just returned from a round the world surfing/painting tour of Cuba, New Zealand, Tahiti and Hawaii –chronicled in Surfer’s Journal out on news stands sometime next year– Schworer got straight to work opening his new Zihuatanejo gallery. The decision to finally open a gallery, says Schworer, after 4 years of selling on the sand wasn’t just to sell more paintings — no matter which far flung beach locale or rocky cliff top where he sits up his easel, he finds eager buyers. But to let the other “…99% of the people that come here that don’t even know I exist have a chance to see my work and because it’s a great opportunity to showcase other talented local artists.”
Schworer has been living in Zihua and selling his dramatic landscape and surf oil paintings of Zihuatanejo Bay and other surrounding beaches for four years. The amazing thing about Peter’s work isn’t that he captures the waves and landscapes he loves, so well, but that he is completely self taught with no formal training. A life long surfer of prestige and 20 year visitor to this area for the surfing, Schworer has only been painting for about 6 years. The story of what turned Peter the Surfer into Peter the Painter is a fascinating one indeed and one I’m sure you can get out of him in gory detail for the mere asking. I’ll spare you the gruesome details but it all started back in 1994 with a horrific near fatal surfing accident on some deserted beach up the coast. The end result being 7 days in a hospital here and another month in a hospital in California. After six months in a wheel chair, “with nothing on TV but O.J. Simpson,” Peter decided to take up painting and at some point decided walking and surfing again would be a good idea too. Ask any surfer out there trying to catch a wave if Peter still surfs and they’ll tell you they’re happier when he leaves the water to paint. And for the multitudes of proud owners of his oil paintings around the world, they’re happy when he leaves the water too. Now that Schworer has a gallery to set up his easel in, he’ll be land locked on Juan Alvarez most evenings and occasionally mornings too, depending on the waves of course!
Stop by and see the work of a man who lives to surf and paint, inspired only… “To capture a moment in time, the serenity, the harmony of life…” and oh yeah, by “…the fear of having to do something else for a living too.”
In addition to Schworer, Z-Town gallery hosts several other local and international artists. David Solomon, voted World’s Best Watercolorist by the World Watercolor Society. Gabriel Vitta Filleaudeau, oil painter originally from Argentina, residing in Zihuatanejo for the past 9 years. Chadwick Kirk, former architect and engineer, who has exhibited his watercolor painting in Tacoma, Puyallup, Seattle, Bellevue and Bainbridge Island, WA and Ketchikan and Anchorage, AK and Aspen, CO. And several more artists to be announced. Z-Town gallery is now open and located at 13 Juan A. Alvarez -the road parallel to Playa Principal, the orange building on the corner of Alvarez and Agustin Ramirez, just up the road from Coconuts and JJ’s.
-December 2000
(Editor´s note: Z-Town Gallery is no longer open.)
