Biography

Growing up in multicultural Toronto, Zarum encountered many cultures, languages, and customs. This sparked his curiosity and led him to explore how people differ and later, how they are alike. Over time, that perspective became part of his art. 

Zarum grew up in a musical family with parents who sang, an uncle who played Flamenco guitar, and cousins who performed professionally on piano and guitar. He taught himself guitar, had a natural singing voice, and at 16 recorded a 45 RPM single of two original songs. He then formed a band and played bars, clubs, and concerts across Canada.

Art became a natural outlet for him. Zarum started buying art and painting in 1986, inspired by Miro, Kandinsky, Picasso, Gris, Dali, Appel, Kahlo, Chagall, Ernst, Bacon, and later acquiring Vasarely, Leger, Shemy, and Agam at auctions. His early free-form abstracts recorded visual visions. Many early pieces and part of his collection were damaged or stolen during a move from many years in Miami back to Toronto. He returned to art and music a decade later with renewed focus.

After returning to Toronto, Zarum ran several businesses that kept him busy and sent him traveling across the US, Europe, and the Middle East. In the late 1990s he began painting again while recording an album. His passion remained, but his technique had evolved. He painted transformed versions of things around him in an original, fresh, and deep style. Having stepped away from earlier influences for years, his renewed work felt fully his untainted and true. He started showing his art, and after moving to Amsterdam in 2002 his dedication to painting became all-consuming.

A friend from Amsterdam who owned a grand historic estate in Spain’s Costa Blanca invited Zarum. In early 2003 he visited and immediately felt “at ‘home’, likely due to Spanish roots on his mother’s side and exposure to Spanish music. Zarum spent long periods at the estate; in winter 2004–05, alone in the 2,000 m², 300‑year‑old castle, he began the FACES painting series, later shown in Amsterdam.

Zarum found so much inspiration in Spain that he kept creating many works there. He set up a new studio in Jijona beneath the ruins of a Moorish castle and began painting some of his largest, most colorful canvases.

In 2009 Zarum moved back to Canada and began buying lakefront lots on the area's "Millionaires Row," about an hour from downtown Toronto. Today his estate is the largest waterfront property on that lake. In 2017 he finished a grand landmark home there, which includes his new studio where he still creates and sells collectible art.

Zarum is among the few artists who built a following and sold works largely by word of mouth and the strength of the art, not gallery ties. Now Zarum plans to partner with select galleries worldwide. “I’m encouraged by gallery feedback and believe collaborating with like-minded professionals will be enjoyable and profitable. My productivity and discipline are strong, so the future looks exciting.”

Over time, Zarum’s practices in art, music, and woodworking began to converge. Years spent as a guitarist and vocalist, raised among professional musicians and flamenco guitarists, sharpened his understanding of sound from the inside out. Parallel to this, his work in visual art refined a sensitivity to balance, tension, and restraint, while extensive experience in fine woodworking developed a deep respect for material, structure, and process. Guitar building emerged organically at the intersection of these disciplines, a place where musical intuition, visual composition, and physical craft could exist in a single object. For Zarum, the guitar is not a departure from his earlier work, but its natural continuation: a functional artwork shaped by heritage, material intelligence, and lived musical experience.