Painting with Photography

While attending the Copper School of Art in Cleveland, Ohio, I often visited the Dali Museum in Beachwood, Ohio. One image on display there was his painting, the Hallucinogenic Matador. I would sit for hours watching people look at this paintings. It is a very large image with a roman colosseum and repeated images of the statue of Venus deMilo. Superimposed over this is the face of a matador which pops out at you after you look at it for a few minutes. People would actually jerk their head back when this happened for the first time, and I always felt that if I could ever create a visual image that powerful, that could cause a body reaction because of it, then I would finally be creating the kind of images I want to make.

We now live in a very scary world so I try to create images out of dreams and fantasies, because that is where I believe we will finally find the answers we all seek. I aspire after the surreal visions of my mentor and digital photography has given me the real, while the computer has allowed me to create the sur. I want people to travel through my surrealscapes and search for what ever they can find just as I am searching with my life and art to find the best way to live and express my dreams and visions. What I do can be best expressed as Painting with Photography on a Digital Canavas.

Jerry Hanzl also creates websites!