Vaz Zastera

Vaz Zastera moved to Canada from Czechoslovakia with his family at the age of five. His early works were inspired and influenced by his father, Vaslav Zastera Sr., who was a professor, an architect, and a prominent artist in both painting and sculpture. Vaz's exposure to this highly creative environment developed his passion for the arts, and he has continued this tradition by developing his own unique technique of painting.

Vaz explored opportunities and avenues of expressing his creative dreams at the University of Ottawa, and Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, where he studied both music and art. Over the years he has developed techniques using paint formulations in combination with a variety of materials. He has worked with ceramics, marble, granite, wood and optic glass. His present work celebrates a return to his most passionate medium combination - galvanized sheet steel and high gloss enamel paints.

Instead of using canvas, paper, or wood, Vaz breaks tradition and utilizes galvanized sheet metal to receive the high tech paints. This gives each piece an underlying fortitude that is a Zartwerks trademark. This material combination provides a smoothness that results in unique interactions, creating numerous dimensions and multi-faceted images. A composition can appear quite simple at first glance, but upon closer inspection, becomes far more complex, allowing several levels of interpretation.

Through this media, Vaz filters his dreams and creates unique, distinctive, and innovative compositional structures by synthesizing nature with his imagination and feelings. "My intent is to create a fantastical composition that is inspired from nature and science, yet breaks common and accepted notions of representation by trying to create something completely new..... it is an interpretive vision of nature and life, expressing a conceptual view."

It is this flux between the natural world and the fantastical that each Zartwerk seeks to explore.

Vaz Zastera's work can be found in his Burritt's Rapids Studio, as well as in galleries in Ottawa and Merrickville. For more information please Contact Us.

Vaz is a member of the Merrickville Artists' Guild and The Ottawa Mixed Media Artists Association.

Vaz works at Lightmachinery