Starvin Artist (Remastered)

A skeletal tree carved into a gaunt human face, mouth open in silent hunger, guitar slung across its chest like a final possession. Luminous orbs of pink, gold, blue, and green orbit the bare branches—visions, dreams, possibilities floating just out of reach. The roots dig into cracked earth, drawing from soil that has nothing left to give. This is the artist’s own portrait: starving, yet surrounded by the fruit of the mind. Original work by Albert Zeno (Albany Zeno Sr., 1929–1999), remastered and preserved in 2025 by his son, Albany Zeno Jr., using AI-assisted techniques that honor the artist's intent, symbolism, and unflinching self-portrait of hunger and defiant creation. Part of the Zeno Reborn: Genesis collection — the first public digital resurrection of a lost Chicago surrealist who painted through poverty, whose work confronted nuclear anxiety, environmental collapse, and the parallel exploitation of people and nature, as embodied in the enduring 1972 Hyde Park "Alewives and Mercury Fish" mural. This piece stands as the artist's own testimony: I was starving, but I never stopped growing.