Pat Goltz

Feel free to comment on my work in German and other languages. I want to thank all of you for the VERY warm welcome I have received! I can't possibly keep up with all of you, but I will visit your gallery as soon as I can.

I strive to be a Renaissance person in my life, someone who loves learning and practices virtue and joy. When I do art, my mind is engaged in pure thought, bypassing language. The visual impression itself is the meaning. My art begins with a found object, such as a random mathematical formula or something that catches my eye and therefore my camera. As I develop it, the found object and what I do to it merge seamlessly. My image grows as an organic object. When I do art, I discover what is hidden in the medium and reveal it, much as a sculptor finds the object in the rock and chips away everything that does not belong to the object. When I take a photograph, I merge with my subject and become my subject. Failure to do this means the photograph will not please me.

When I do photography, my purpose is to make natural beauty available to people who cannot go where I go.

I consider something to be art if it is beautiful, or inspires a person to do a humanitarian act. Art is supposed to be a conscious representation of order, not chaos. It is not supposed to be ugly. While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, for me it must have form and meaning. It should show skill. It is not violent, either to humanity, or to sensibility. Art shows the inner peace of the artist. Even artists who are in horrible life situations can have that inner peace, and it shines through. If there is not that inner beauty, I can't connect with the art or the artist.

When I do digital art, I often prepare my own "raw materials", such as scripts in Apophysis, or materials in Bryce.

Soli Deo Gloria.