Friday, April 1, 2011

George Roedler - Photographer

Flameout
George Roedler

George Roedler
St. Paul, Minnesota
Email: g3photographic@yahoo.com
Website: www.bluecanvas.com/G3
MNartist.org profile: http://www.mnartists.org/George_Roedler

Bio~
I'm a St. Paul based photographer. At the moment I'm working on both surreal images in photography and more traditional work in portraits and landscapes. My last show, an Art Crawl holdover at Rumours, St. Paul, featured photographs paired with haiku.

Tell me about your work? What are you currently working on? How is this different from past projects?
Recently I began a project with Minnesota Opera's Imagine Opera, making a promotional image for an upcoming children's opera production of "The Giver," so that's been very exciting. Its a big deal because not only is it the Minnesota Opera, but Lyric Opera in Kansas City is involved as well. Usually my work is my own, and its not from a commissioned project like this. Anything that has seen commercial use was part of something I was doing for me and it happened to fit what someone else was doing, like an album cover, some web art, like that. This is art...fine art for a fine art organization, but its commercial, too. So far the process has been really interesting, a challenge to interpret layers of interpretation.

Sam
"What is Art?" is certainly too big of a question to ask here, but what do you hope your audience takes away from your art? What statement do you hope to make?
Well, I suppose ideally they would come away from my work with more questions than answers; I don't think I'm out to make statements outright, but I am always questioning, asking why, why not, what if.

If I had to say, I guess my statement is pretty uniform across every image I make, and its "Isn't this cool?" And by "this" I don't mean the image itself, not the art, but something else, almost anything else...how its made, the process, maybe its of a tree...isn't the tree cool? Isn't it cool to be able to see, so see something new, different, is it exciting, how about being alive...is that cool?

If I'm really engaging my viewer, then they are going to come back to the images, even one image, time and time again and its still going to give them something new even after repeated viewings. My ideal is the notion that someone sees my work and comes away thinking, "What. Was. That!" so they are compelled to return and experience it again. To me...that's art.

Desire
What was the best advice given to you as an artist?
Breathe through your navel.


Tell me about your working space and your creative process.
I plan, visualize, write my ideas out, sketch them, obsess about them, talk about them...sometimes to myself, and then all that gets trashed, burned, stomped on and disregarded when I start making the photographs.

If I'm shooting a person then its all about the interaction and chemistry we have helping us along. If I'm doing landscapes, its the place, the sky, Mother Earth helping to make or break the images. The planning helps, provides a launching point, but once the cameras come out and things starts to happen, for me its best to get out of the way and let it just happen, not let my mind or ego clutter things up.

Who are some of the Minnesota artists you enjoy?
I like Ta-Coumba Aiken's work lately; he's been doing some interesting work, and that's about as big a compliment as I can make for any artist.

If I were to follow you around to see art in Minnesota, which places would we go? What would we see?
If I'm with my daughters, we hit the Walker Art Center. Hands down. Love it there. But I really don't go art hunting much. The Art Crawl I usually sneak in to a few places, but other than that, if I'm by a gallery that's interesting I might pop in and look around. I like seeing other photographer's work, especially if they are doing something that I just don't do...reportage from the war zones or famine areas, exotic locations, hardcore documentary stuff. I love all that, but I don't do it.

SilverSword

Where do you go online for good art resources, whether to find a new artist, or to see what is going on in the art world locally and otherwise?
I'm always at Bluecanvas.com. Great online resource for all sorts of tasty stuff. Other than that I'm just googling images and seeing what comes up.

Mona

What can we expect to see from you in the future?
I've been working with Abbie Rhodes' Psychedelic Spectacle, a St. Paul burlesque show. I'd like to be able to do some more portraiture and fine art stuff with them. They're a blast to be with, really smart, really funny, teeth clenchingly sexy.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Love the quote about your process. Very smart, your brain is a great asset but when the time comes you gotta get your brain outta the way.