Every Day Artist – Lauren Page Wadsworth

We live in a world where art is at our fingertips every day and to see people’s artistic vision can be both inspiring and enchanting.  Each month we like to put the spotlight on an artist who challenges us to see art in a new and different way. Today, we sit down with artist Lauren Page Wadsworth and find out more about her creative drive and imagination.

People that know me well call me a Renaissance woman. I have never been content following one path at a time. I prefer two or three paths, letting them weave in and out, informing and inspiring each other, keeping me on my toes. At the moment, I am on my 12th year as a professional and fine art photographer, and am also a PhD candidate in clinical psychology. My whole life has been a dance between art and science, photography and psychology. For the first two years of graduate school I put photography on the back burner, thinking it would only slow down my degree. However, I noticed that it had negative impacts on my mood, and therefore my productiveness. I dove back in, and felt a huge amount of emotional release and exhilaration. What you see now on my website and Facebook page is largely work from the last 10 months. It has been an exponential explosion of adventure, learning, and happiness. More about those later. Other fun facts about me: I am a super-taster, an archer (the wood bow and arrow kind), and my hair and eye color have been a topic of debate for as long as they’ve been in existence.

My mom mostly, and also my dad. My mom has always been a photographer, same as me, interested in photographing everything and anything. She had a camera shop starting in the 80s, all the way up till I was 18. Side note: she recently showed me some of her photography from when she was my age, and it is eerily similar, with some shots being almost identical- so we are going to do a joint show soon in Boston and Western NY. My dad has always approached the world from an artistic and creative standpoint, which also inspired me and gave me space to explore art without judgement (I remember snooping around the attic as a kid and finding a box of masks he made in art school that were completely terrifying). He also has a flare for science, and introduced me to the golden mean/ratio and trying to understand (some of) beauty in nature and art from a scientific lens. Although I always had a camera, when I was 16, I took a picture of my sister Piper that formally set off my trajectory as a photographer (you’ll see her in many of my photos over the years). For the next 6 years I took courses, earning a BA in photography, and started a business doing weddings and portraits to pay for my never ending wish list of lenses and other supplies.

The thing I love most about fine art photography (especially from the context of doing a lot of weddings and portraits) is that there are no boundaries. Fine art photography allows me to explore my wants, my emotions, the things I am missing, the things I love, and allows me to capture beauty and accentuate it in moments that I stumble upon it. I also love when people pick up on the emotion behind my work, getting to know me on a level that I might not normally share. If you’re paying attention, you’ll often notice an undertone of melancholy in my work, even in the most stunning and beautiful capture of the milky way. Much of my fine art photography is about longing, longing to be closer to nature, being brought to tears or speechlessness by the beauty around me, while also knowing that everything is temporary and fleeting.

So much. My more recent lessons have been:

A. If you think “I should take a photo of that,” DO IT. Don’t say “I’ll come back and do it later, or “maybe I shouldn’t take it with my camera phone,” or “it’s probably not that good of a shot anyways,” or “I’m nervous to ask that person to take their photo.” Take the photo, and take it right now. What you are seeing is important, it is beautiful, and it probably has something to do with each small piece of it, the exact composition of how people are sitting, the lighting, etc., and those small pieces change so fast.

B. Art. creating and sharing it, is therapeutic. Even though it might take up time, and you are a very busy person, it is going to benefit your mood, stress level, and sense of self in a way that completing 100 tasks at work never will. A great mentor of mine said, when I admitted I was thinking about turning back towards photography my third year of graduate school, “Lauren, you know you are always going to be extremely busy, you will always fill your time and feel you have little of it. If you add in photography, you will be just as busy, maybe a little more, and you will also be happier. If you know how to be happier, you must do that.”

Well, I am a little obsessed with the unique qualities of each lens, so my camera bag has become a huge camera backpack in the last year. In size order I have…2 lens cleaning wipe packs, some business cards in case passerbys ask to see the product of a photo I’m taking, some tissues and rubber bands (creative way to diffuse light from a flash if it’s too intense), a pen…because someone always needs a pen, batteries for my flash, a shutter release for astrophotography, my wonderful canon 5d mark ii, and the following canon lenses: EF 24-70mm 2.8L, EF 70-200mm 2.8L IS, EF 16-35mm 2.8L, EF 50mm 1.2L, EF 100mm 2.8L IS Macro. I’m not sure if this is cheating, but I really like having a tripod with me, as I love pushing the boundaries with light, especially in portraiture, and you have to have it for night photos.

Thank you Lauren for your inspirational imagery and words.  If you would like to see more of Lauren’s work you  can visit her website HERE  and her instagram HERE. Lauren uses Printique for all of her fine print needs.