Video: Steve Wilda on Leaving Our Mark

In this video, Steve Wilda, the exhibition organizer of Leaving Our Mark: In Celebration of the Pencil, discusses how the project came together and the artists that are featured.

Transcript

I’m Steve Wilda and I’m an artist from Hadley Massachusetts and I work extensively in graphite. I was always very passionate about black and white imagery: black and white films, black and white photography. I think it’s very different working in black and white because it’s a little out of the ordinary. Most artists use a pencil just for sketching and outlining a painting, and everyone in the group, has taken this further to create a picture that looks like a finished painting.

My experience with this being like a little camaraderie of artists, it’s brought out things inside me that I feel that I never had before felt because I was always doing exhibitions on my own. For me it’s been a very important part of my life as an artist because I’ve met so many other artists.

I think the show itself is more broad than I had expected originally. Even the artists that are working with a realistic-type approach, everyone’s work looks different. In my years of drawing, I never zeroed in on something that exact and I like that quality about it. Lisa had drawn a picture of a church, a closeup of hands, and the range that she can do with her art is very intriguing, it’s very impressive. There’s a wide variety of emotions in what they did. There are artists that have dramatic excitement, there’s others that have elegant beauty.

I think they’re all very proud to be exhibiting in a beautiful museum like this.