John Walz
When you're not creating, where would we most likely find you? This summer you’ll most likely find me training, I’m working my ass off to raise my national triathlon ranking. Right now might be a bad time to ask I am really burned out but I’m still working at it. It’s just like the art I really want to be really good at something. So I’m grinding it out yesterday I swam a mile and ran eight, today I biked thirty and ran four and these arent’t special days they’re typical but I think I’m going to retire from triathlon after a nationals in the middle of August so I do have that to look forward to.
Would you say your artistic style found you, or you found it? I think it was just there, it took time for me to come around to accept it. To stop trying to be someone else and to have the self-confidence to make the things I want to make. When I give myself over to it there is a consistency from one camera to the next and from one media to the next it’s just all an extension of me. My experience has been that once I decided that I’m good at what I do and anyone who disagrees can kiss my ass then I
#5 30x36 inkjet started to be myself and style just found me but I wasn’t looking for cause I no longer gave a shit.
What medium do you work in, and what attracts you to it? One of the two main media are the small collages they vary in size but 5x7 inches is pretty normal I collect old magazines, encyclopedias, shopping lists and my own photos and then use tape or more often glue sticks and create these things then scan them and print up to 10 times larger. The other media is photography but that really isn’t as simple as that I use an 8x10 camera that was built in 1906 and a Nikon digital that just came out last fall- and almost everything in between, a Polaroid from the 60s that had a conversion to take pack film in the 80s, I shoot almost a dozen different formats of film with outrageously expensive cameras and incredibly cheap cameras that I build myself. The photography just makes sense to me it’s subtractive, I start with the whole world and then crop it down to this little square or rectangle. The collage is the perfect counterpoint to it I start with a scrap of paper and then start adding to it. The two just make sense to sometimes add and sometimes subtract helps me feel like I have some sort of creative equilibrium.
How would you describe the ambiance of your studio space? Smelly and dark. The darkroom is smelly from the chemicals and a drain that isn’t quite right, and the area where I make collages is adjacent to it, it smells almost the same with the added fumes of oil paint and turpentine.
www.poetsandartists.com
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