Artists & Performing Arts
Jay Schadler
Digital Photography

Influenced by the simplicity of Edward Hopper and the imagination of Salvatore Dali, Jay Schadler’s digital photography captures a place between reality and fantasy, not unlike the moment of waking from a dream.

Each piece starts as a digital photograph upon which he adds pastels and sometimes digital enhancements. But technology aside, he notes, the bottom line is that the image has integrity to it, conveys feeling, and is so authentic that it invites people to literally come up and touch the art. “My feeling about all of that is the only thing that matters is the image,” says Schadler. “Does it speak to you, does it affect you, do you like it?”

Schadler, an Emmy-award winner who has been a correspondent and anchor for ABC news for 25 years, says he became very aware and conscious of visual imagery through his work in journalism, which led him to first pick up a camera in 1994. “I’ve always done art in some fashion; even as a teenager and young man I was either painting or drawing or sketching,” he explains. “As I evolved as a television journalist I was always at the back of the camera going, ‘Let’s try to take this picture.’”

But unlike his work for ABC, which requires a great deal of collaboration before a story ends up on the air, Schadler’s digital photography allows him complete involvement in a creative process that begins when he finds a compelling subject to photograph and sometimes doesn’t end until the canvas is on the wall.

“The great thing with the camera I’ve found is that it’s all mine,” says Schadler. “I love the independence that it gives me.”

When Lou and Marianne Garuglio selected five of his canvases to fill a large blank wall in their Hampton Falls, N.H., home, the artist asked if at first he could take a look at the space and explore other possibilities. Instead of using the five randomly selected pieces, Schadler suggested printing six large canvases of a single image of a Portsmouth skyline. Installed along the top of the two-story wall, the familiar skyline is both photograph and painting through such touches as a blazing yellow moon, rolling blue sky, and vibrantly colored buildings.

“Photography does not have to be little square boxes behind glass and mats,” says Schadler. “It can be much more than that.”

Though his job with ABC demands a full schedule and much traveling, Schadler’s Amesbury studio is filled with 10,000 pieces, which he says is due to working seven days a week and bringing the work with him on assignments.

He opens the studio by appointment, and tries to make it back to the unexpected, open space on the top floor of an 18th-century Amesbury mill building as often as he can. “It makes you want to create,” says Schadler. “And I like the scale of the place. It’s always fun doing bigger-than-life images or scaling up pictures. There’s a power to some images that you can only truly appreciate when the size is there too.”

Schadler hopes to eventually spend more time on both creating new images and working with architects and designers on residential and commercial installations. He finds many photography subjects around the Seacoast area, intrigued by not only the natural beauty in places like Newburyport’s Plum Island, but also by decaying buildings in Amesbury’s partially revived downtown, and directed not by any certain plan but by what interests him next. “I have a very eclectic interest in the world, and my art, I think, respects that,” he says, acknowledging it also seems to serve as a metaphor for his life. “Every time I turn around I feel like I want to start down another path.

“I see art everywhere I turn, and I want to express it, change it, and play with it,” Schadler adds. “I’m doing it with my stories, and I do it here.”

Jay Schadler | Amesbury, Mass.
978 388-0717 | jschadler1@aol.com
www.jayschadler.com
Pricing: For images, standard sizes matted $95 to $495, standard sizes framed $125 to $675. Call or email for custom sizes, and installations.