Evolution of an Artist
When Lenny Katz was 20 years old, he saw Paris. He arrived one rainy Sunday on the old Orient Express, a G.I. on leave from Germany. This shaped his life. "The taste and feel of Europe - especially Paris - haunted me. I wanted to spend the rest of my life experiencing the different moods and impressions of the world, so I decided to be a writer - that way I could be free to travel and not be called a bum."
As he experienced different cultures and lifestyles, he worked at a variety of jobs. He taught English in Barcelona, Spain; drove a cab in Los Angeles and San Francisco; worked on a cable car in San Francisco; painted apartments in Jerusalem; waited on tables in Aspen; was a gardener in Hawaii. He traveled to India and around the world as a photo-journalist. Sitting in a Berkely diner, having just returned from a photo trip to India, Katz was lookinng out the window when he was struck by the vivid red, white and blue colors of the Standard service station across the street. In the driving rain, the colors glistening on the pavement hit him as if he were seeing color for the first time.
After two months of photographing the dusty brown and greys of India, he felt as though he were seeing "technicolor". Having worked in black and white photography, stressing the simplicity of form, a yearning now grew within him to fill those forms with the magic of color. Several years later, the overwhelming desire to express the "music" of color led him to put down his camera for paint brushes. Now a committed artist, he had to be where the "magic" was. Ten years before, he had visited Kona and knew from his first impression of the black lava that eventually this would be his permanent home. Home at last, immersed in color, nurtured by the scintillating energy of a land still erupting and forming, Katz creates.
05/05/02 