John Walz
Explain your process from start to finish. I have no idea of process I make, I just make I know it’s a matter of editing. I believe in collage or in photography it’s a matter of making a lot and then throwing away the lousy but how I make changes all the time. I sometimes don’t know why I keep going. I’m turning 40 this year and I still don’t know who I am or what I really value. If I wasn’t making art I don’t think I’d have a good feeling about myself. I like to think I’m giving something back by making art but secretly I know I’m looking for people to tell me I’m good at something because I’m still somewhat insecure. I have some notoriety and make some money but It’d always feel better to have more. So I know my process is borne out of some frantic need to keep moving keep creating to be the me that I think I might be but how I do that, I really don’t know I just keep doing something and when that gets dull I move to something else.
What are you working on right now? Nothing really, but at the same time a bunch of things. I think the pictures of my daughters will be this big thirty-year or longer project. I’m still shooting my landscapes and sneaking into the basement to work on my small collages. I am still shooting some weddings and other commissioned work. I know I’ve already done so much if I can just scan and archive what I’ve already done. I mean I have dozens of awesome projects that nobody has ever seen I just need to get them out there somehow I trying to do that, and I am working on a children's book about a pig and a dog.
If you could choose any artist to collaborate with, who would it be? Whenever I’ve tried to collaborate with other artists it’s been really difficult working on a single piece I never want to cover up what the other person did, it’s an overrespect for the other artist. Last year I got all hot and heavy to do a bunch of illustrations that went with my friend John Dorsey’s poems. He e-mailed me the poems and I spent a couple hours rereading and brainstorming, I worked out some sketches and then haven’t done anything. I guess you can add that to the what I’m working on.
Do you feel you fit into any specific movement or style? Singer Songwriter. I realize I’m not a musician but I’m inspired by Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Roscoe Holcomb anyone who says it like they mean it. Telling a story that may not be literally true but has a truth to it or is actually true. To present things sans bullshit is the moist important thing to me.
Oh yeah I do still think about this other thing that I’m moderately embarrassed to say out loud, but you’re so cool. I call it subtle surrealism. I’m really inspired by Dali and even more by Rene Magritte and I have this idea that everyday things become surreal once they are photographed and then closely examined. That is to say I rarely encounter burning giraffes but life is just strange anyway.
Who are your biggest creative influences? Early on it was John Cage, Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg then as I moved more into photography it was Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand but in recent years it’s been Mark Rothko and Richard Diebenkorn and in large part my college roommate Carl Peters who has a similar sensibility to the color field painters I really feel like when I’m out shooting landscapes I’m looking for Carl paintings.
As an artist, how would you define success? To keep going, to find something in you that makes you want to keep going after school and when the rest of the world is indifferent to whether you do it or not. Once you find that your going to keep creating regardless of “success” then you’ve succeeded in my book.
www.poetsandartists.com
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