I view an “artist’s statement” as a fluid document that provides coordinates for where I am as artist at a particular point in time as well as a roadmap showing where I am headed and how I am planning to get there. However, every so often along the way I encountered those proverbial forks in the road or as Robert Frost so beautifully stated:
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both”
The result is that the “artist’s statement” that I wrote and felt certain bared the soul of an artist changes, evolves as I find myself sometimes following the road less traveled and other times choosing the more frequently trodden path. So it is with my “artist’s statement” and now I find it necessary to rewrite it reflecting decisions I have made since writing the original and, importantly, introducing the place where I am now and see myself heading in the future.
Ed Vatza’s Artist Statement
While specific details have changed over time, the basic foundation of my art remains remarkably strong and unwavering.
From the outset, my focus has been on photographing the natural world that is available to almost every person almost every day. I am not a travel photographer although I do photograph the places I visit. My art does not requite me to go to special places. Yet the places I go to are special. I look to capture the sunrises, sunsets, landscapes, seascapes, trees, flowers, wildlife that the ordinary person can see almost anywhere. They have only to open their eyes and look around them. In a sense, I am a street photographer of the natural world.
But my difference is that I don’t wish to capture, display or exploit the ordinary, the mundane elements of nature in our everyday life. No, I seek to capture these ordinary, everyday features of the natural world in extraordinary ways making them heroic. Simply put, I want the viewer of my art to look at my images and wonder “How did he do that?”, “Why did I never SEE that before?” and possibly ask the most important question behind the image “Why? Why did he make this image? What was his vision and do I share in it?”.
So as my journey progresses, I continue to explore ways to make the ordinary extraordinary. At one point, it seemed the path was straight and narrow and pointed directly to impressionistic photography, a love of mine to this day. I continue to feel that photo-impressionism allows me to maintain the most important features of my work – the compositional elements (line, form, color, texture) that are responsible for creating the beauty in the natural world while eliminating those elements that make the ordinary ordinary. I continue to create impressionistic images today.
But now I find that some of the decisions I have made along the way have led me back to photo-realism but still brushed with some impressionistic elements – a seascape with silky smooth water; a sunrise turned into a sea of color by a horizontal swipe; a landscape reflected in the rippling water. All different yet all the same – taking something ordinary, something that we see every day and making it into something extraordinary.
It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. So I invite you to look at my images, read the story they tell and share my vision, if only for a moment.