Vera Vasek

American artist, born 1959

BiographyVera Vasek was born in Buffalo, NY in 1959. Her mother, a homemaker, is the daughter of immigrants from the mountains of Slovakia in central Europe. Her father, a mechanical engineer, married her mother in Canada after fleeing his Moravian homeland in communist Czechoslovakia. Raised in the sprawling suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, Vera spent quality time of her childhood in the densely populated Rocky River Watershed and specifically, in the valley located across the street from her home, where the shale ledges of Baldwin Creek would expose, from time to time, rock fossils of ferns and leafy plants.

By age 19, Vera found her way to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she was awarded a BFA in sculpture at Louisiana State University in 1983. Her practice was focused on classical realism. In 1984 Vera was accepted into the apprenticeship program at the Johnson Atelier Technical Institute of Sculpture, where she successfully cast her life size figure of a kneeling woman that she modeled in water clay at LSU.

In 1986, Vera's work was juried into the Annual Exhibition at the National Academy of Design and the non-members exhibition at the Salmagundi Club in Manhattan.

In search of a new beginning for her work, Vera made her way to Key West, Florida in 1988. Once experiencing the back country, or intertidal zone of the keys, she began pulling plaster images off the tidal markings found in the sand produced by the flow of water. The act of documenting these "Tidal Reliefs", as she calls them, has brought her practice to focusing on process with the eventual outcome obtained through physical endurance, observation and chance.

Vera lives and works on Sugarloaf Key, Florida, overlooking the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

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