Artist's Statement - Wayne Nowack

The artist - Wayne Nowack

After a long period of evolution over two-thirds of the 20th century, my work, with many influences, old and new, has arrived at it's present state of a love for the sanctity of the infinite visual riches of the natural world -- all to be found where I presently reside...

My work spans nearly two thirds of the twentieth century from an early naturalism through abstraction and "avant-garde" interests to cultivation of a "late" personal style which amalgamates many influences from earlier sources, including an intensive study of the Western and Oriental arts from the Renaissance to the present.
My beliefs were associated with modernism from 1945, or the "avant-garde" up to about 1960 when I discerned a surrender of the intensity and sincerity of the modernist esthetic with a replacement by a commercial seller-buyer ethos.
Before 1970 my work had evolved, step by step, toward semi-abstraction in painting, collage and three dimensional box construction, all of which sold well in commercial galleries in Los Angeles and New York.
Presently, I would characterize my work as a vividly charged personal naturalism, fructified by the early healthy influences from the pre-1960 modernist movement. This work is now deeply rooted in my love for the surrounding forests and rural land of our homestead in upstate New York.