Tedd Nash Pomaski

MK: What do you define as art?

TP: Art is the result of creative energy. It has to be intentional. It has to be the intentional output of creative energy.

MK: What inspired you to become an artist?

TP: I had a friend whose mother was an artist. I always loved art, and, drawing and painting but it never occurred to me I could do it for a living. I was going to become an architect. But I had a friend whose mother was a painter. At a young age she decided that if she had to eat Ramen noodles or not she would do it and be a painter. I think she was the first person to inspire me to become an artist for a living.

MK: What inspires your art?

TP: I have this theory of ritual energy or psychic energy. If you go to a hospital operating room which is a subject I studied or a natural environment like where I am right now which is next to a river, the energy that accrues in those kind of places is totally different. Through meditating and through my art practice, I have become sensitive to those kind of changes in energy and the individual energy of a place. That is what draws me in and starts compelling me to document the place by painting, drawing, or videotaping.

MK: Do you do a lot of videotaping?

TP: Yes. A lot of my drawings are based on videos I shoot. I use them instead of photographs because I like to reference my subject’s energy and movement and video helps me do that more than photograph.

MK: I noticed that in a lot of your artwork you leave parts of the canvas empty and white. Is there a reason?

TP: It is the idea that I am extracting something from the environment and not taking the whole thing. I want to show what I am sensitive to in terms of the energy I have been talking about. Leaving emptiness around it is a way of indicating that I am not showing the whole picture. I am just showing parts that I am extracting from what is there and sort of there around me.

MK: I also saw that you have had exhibits in many locations especially Hawaii. Has Hawaii inspired you?

TP: Hugely. I left Hawaii to go to college and I never came back for 19 years and I came back last year for the first time and it was shocking how much my art has changed. It is reminding me of what my roots are. All of these years I was gone I would wonder why I am doing what I am doing. Coming back and exploring that has been really exciting for me.

MK: Why do you think you art changed?

TP: In a lot of my art, the origin is what inspired me. Spending time in a place, I start to feel different with different energies and different layers. May subjects in my paintings and my drawings are places I spent a considerable amount of time visiting on locations drawing many drawings, sketching many sketches, videotaping there. I got a job in a hospital for nine months to study the operating rooms and that totally changed the way I made my work for a long time being around that much trauma and death and disaster.

MK: There is one group of work you did called Pattern Intervention where you have a series of lines going through your art. Why did you do that?

TP: That is actually the most recent group; I am still working on, actually still in Hawaii. I started them here. That pattern is called a Cheveron. In Native American culture it means one thing but in Hawaiian culture it symbolizes death. I think one of those long term subjects of my work has been mortality and the way we face it and the way we embrace it and our eventual demise and how we incorporate ourselves back into the cycle of nature. Hawaiian religion is pretty nature based and it has a violent side to it and it is a way of reflecting who I am. It is not just about nature but nature in Hawaii and how that relates to me, and my upbringing, and my culture.

MK: When you did the series on the hospital, why did you refer to it as a “lighthouse”?

TP: If you read the titles they are all proverbs and one of the titles is “Darkness rains on the side of the lighthouse” which is another way of saying when you are in the light you can be in the most darkness. It is just another reference to mortality. In the hospital, life hangs on the balance almost every day and there is a constant closeness between life and death. It is more palpable there than anywhere else in my life. The proverb about the darkness and the lighthouse neatly sums that up.

MK: When I first discovered your work, the first group I saw was Travelling Watercolors. It was very colorful and then I saw your other work and I thought it was by a different artist. Why did you take that brief moment of… “colorfulness”?

TP: I actually paint with watercolors all year round, especially when I go camping. It is not like it is regular but when I know I am going on a camping trip and there will be water available like a river or a beach or a lake I will pack a little watercolor kit and paint on site. Most of those are from a trip to Oregon but I have hundreds. I paint all the time. To be honest, it is part of being in the art world. You can paint what you want but the art world take what it wants. The ones that have been the most critically received or have been shown have been my graphite work . There seems to be more interest in them. I keep making things I love to make but they don’t get circulated as much.

MK: My class is only an introduction to art appreciation so how would you want someone not familiar with art, with fresh eyes, to interpret your work?

TP: My goal is to make work that speaks to me about the process of making art. So when I am done I what their to be enough points of intrigue for a viewer so they can access it through many ways. I want them to insert themselves. That is why I don’t include people in my work. I hope the viewer inserts themselves into it.