Ask soon-to-be first time parents how they feel and most will tell you the emotions are overwhelming; an explosive cocktail of fear, anxiety, love, hope and anticipation. For the mother, the physical changes alone are alien and ethereal, and for the father there is an element of watching and waiting, which gave Bay Area artist Eric Zener time for contemplation. “I was so amazed with my wife’s grace and strength and fearlessness. We were both so young, and she was so calm in the face of what looked like a turbulent future. I started doing drawings of her rowing a boat in a giant turbulent sea. That was the beginning of me looking at water and what it can symbolize, and then playing with the idea that water can be a universal womb, if you will,” he explains. Always a figurative painter, Zener started putting his subjects in the water – diving, jumping, flipping, swimming or floating in water.

This artistic epiphany may have been inspired by the birth of his first child, but there is no Hallmark card quality to the work. It is contemporary in its combination of nostalgia and solitude, and that’s no accident as, over the years, Zener has refined his use of water as metaphor. “Life is challenging,” he says. “The hard-edged world that we are confronted with every day can be balanced by this soft, buoyant, liquid place. It offers such a retreat, whether you are physically in the water or just looking at it, it has an uncanny ability to lower the blood pressure.”  Two decades and three kids later, water is still central to Eric Zener’s art.

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Recently Zener has created some unique sculptures that he calls “Kalifeascopes.” Check them out in the video above.