We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Dave Vescio. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Dave below.
Alright, Dave thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?
Taking risks is what makes you feel A-LIVE. Taking risks is that fine line between fear & glory and fear & failure. Taking risks is what makes you become the hero or heroine of your own story. Taking risks is where life truly lives at. So, always take risks. Always push forward. Always go for it! Because 100 years after you die, no one is going to remember you anyways. You’ll ONLY be remembered for the ideas that you helped spread to others. Because in the end you’ll just become another gravestone, in another graveyard, full of other dead bodies, that no one will ever visit again. But what does matter is that you have lived your life to the fullest. That you didn’t allow others to get in your way, of your own dreams, and you went for all your dreams instead. Like I said before, the only thing that matters in life is the ideas that you believe in and the ideas that you are willing to share with others. Those are the ONLY things that will continue beyond one’s death bed. Everything else will be forgotten in time and you will be forgotten in time as well. Mozart is remembered for his songs, Van Gogh is remembered for his paintings, Lincoln is remembered for his war on slavery. We only remember the ideas that people share with us, everything else just doesn’t matter in the end and will never matter again. Ideas is where it’s all at and what it’s all about. Focus on ideas. Focus on spreading your ideas. Focus on becoming one with your ideas. Focus on figuring out what you truly love most about this world & what you most love about yourself and do that instead.
So, since I figured this all out at a very young age, I have always gone for what I truly wanted & needed in life. Sometimes I win, most times I don’t. They say a good salesperson can convince one out of a hundred people to purchase what they are selling; a great salesperson can convince one out of ten. The moral of the story: you are going to fail way more times than you will ever win. So, go for it, take that risk, make those dreams of yours come true, no matter what. Don’t ever quit. Don’t ever give up. Failure is NOT an option. So, that’s what I do. I go for it. I push. I succeeded. I push even more. I want even more. I failed even more. That’s what taking a risk is all about. If you keep on reading this interview, you will see all the different ways on how I took so many different risks over the past three decades to get to where I am currently at today. I hope you enjoy the ride! :)
Dave, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Later on in this interview, I will talk about what I did before the year 2020, but, on my 50th birthday during the covid lockdowns, I decided to pick up a camera to invent a new style of abstract/fine-art photography that deals with that fine line between the life & death of objects, then death & decay, and now, a rebirth (aka spirits or other worldly beings like the supernatural). I specialize in macro/closeup photography of urban decay.
Since 2021, I have won sixteen international awards from the Top 7 photography contests in the world that have an abstract or an Americana category, and I have sold 102 wall art pieces to 65 private art collectors who either live in North America, Europe, Asia, or Australia.
My mission statement with abstract photography is to reveal to the world that even in death & decay of man-made objects, there is still beauty, as well as a new source of energy/life that wants to be born into this world, just in another way. We just need to look at it from a different light, a different perspective. Life truly never ends! It just gets reborn into this world again & again as another essence, another beautiful being. Just like how a caterpillar gruesomely transforms into a butterfly!
I also give my limited-edition abstract photographs another kind of *rebirth*, by printing them on materials close to what they were originally born on. My macro/close-up photographs of metal decay are printed on archival metal; my macro/close-up photographs of decaying plastic are printed on archival acrylic (which is a plastic); to etc. It is my way of making sure my abstract photographs become more life-like than ever before; making them seem like the actual objects that I photographed in the first place.
As for how all of this became true for me, well, I was led to contemporary art by the world-famous artist Paul McCarthy. I worked with Paul for two years straight as a performance artist in two of his art exhibition films (which Hauser & Wirth art gallery funded). I then retired from acting in 2018 and spent the next two years consuming everything I could on contemporary art from PBS’s Art 21 to the writings & documentaries of past abstract artists, such as Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and I even studied petroglyphs & cave paintings (the actual birthplace of abstract art).
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
I would have to say it all began in my senior year in high school. On one specific day in my history class, we had a substitute teacher for one day who was totally intrigued by what I was writing in my notebook. He caught me writing about something other than my schoolwork. So, he came up to me and said quietly to me (something like this): “Don’t ever throw this notebook away. You’re going to be famous one day and people will want to read what you wrote down.” And that began my journey on figuring out what I could one day be great at. I totally believed that a higher power threw this person into my life, this one day in my history class, to show me who I am supposed to become. So, I have always aspired to be great at something and I have always surrounded myself with the ones who are already considered great in this world, and I have constantly read books by the great ones, and even watched or read their interviews talking about their own creative process. The great ones think differently. The great ones think outside of the box. They see the world in a totally different way from everyone else. They don’t want to be like everyone else. They truly want to be their own real authentic selves instead. They are the ones who are literally STANDING OUT from the crowd. Not because they chose that, but, because the crowd chose to push them out of the group instead, and that’s why they literally STAND OUT from everyone else. And by studying all the above over all these different decades, I have slowly become my own real authentic self in my numerous creative journeys along the way. And right now, I am currently trying to start my own art movement within the abstract photography world. I want to blend photography, painting, and sculpture into one. I want to show to the world that photography can be so much more than just a photograph printed on paper or a photograph posted on a website. It can be four dimensional. It can be immersive and interactive. It’s time for photography to walk away from this two-dimensional frame that it has always been living in for these past two centuries and become something more. Something better. Something more like the objects we are photographing in the first place. Just like when the ancient humans first painted the animal creatures on their cave walls and then they finally started to sculpt these images out of wood & rock next. Photography can do the same exact thing. Photography can become so much more than what it currently is. That’s my current journey with abstract photography. To take my art across the United States of America and introduce my artworks to all the different cities in all the different states in all the different art fairs in each of these cities, and then all around the world. :)
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
So, to figure out what I was good to great at, I had to follow a lot of different paths in my life to figure all of this out. Ever since I was 4 years old, all I ever wanted to be was G.I. Joe. I spent my childhood preparing for it by learning how to shoot, hunt, I did Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, Order of the Arrow, and at the age of 18, I finally became a real-life G.I. Joe by becoming a combat infantry soldier in the 25th Infantry Division specializing in jungle warfare. After I realized that I would never be the best of the best at this after a few years of doing it, I then decided it was time to walk away from everything I spent my whole life preparing myself for and begin a brand-new life journey instead. Now, that new journey was hell for me, and I did a lot of stupid stuff along the way. I had to really figure out: “What do I do? Where do I go? And who do I become next?” And I had no freakin clue… So, I got myself into doing some heavy hallucinogenic type drugs like LSD and marijuana laced with PCP which did finally lead me to discovering my next new journey in life. One night, when I was 22 years old, I decided to do LSD out in public with my army friends in the city of Waikiki. While we were outside next to The Ala Wai Canal seeing grass grow and hearing the fish swim underneath the water in the canal (because we were all hallucinating on LSD), I then looked up at the skyscrapers of Honolulu and finally understood why art was art. Before this period of my life, I had no clue what art was. I just saw paint on canvas. I just saw tall buildings made from concrete and steel. But, that night, it all clicked together for me. There was a reason for all these creations. There was a meaning behind all of this. There was a wonderful story being told right in front of my eyes. Art made sense to me now! I get it, I get it, I get it, and now I want to learn how to do it myself. So, ever since I was 22 years old and after I got out of prison (because I was a middleman in a LSD drug cartel during this time period, I was finally caught & sentenced to a federal, hard labor, maximum-security prison called Fort Leavenworth), so, after I got out of prison, I would pick up one artistic medium at a time, learn how to do it, and see if I was any good at it, to see if I truly wanted to continue to pursue it or not. A few I would do as a hobby and most of them I did as an actual profession thinking I may one day be great at it until I realized I would never be great at it because I just did not love it enough like the great ones did. So, ever since I was 26 years old, I have been a professional artist in the following artistic mediums: culinary arts, pastry arts, documentarian, TV photojournalist for CBS News, film & TV acting, and now, I’m an international award-winning contemporary artist. So, the moral of the story. Never quit, never give up, and just keep on pivoting until you can one day make your own dreams come true. Whatever doesn’t work; stop doing it. Whatever does work; keep doing it. And sooner or later you will finally find your way & live the life that you have always wanted to live. But don’t stop there. Keep pushing forward. Keep raising your sights higher and higher and become the best that you can be by becoming the real authentic self that you were always meant to be and become. Now, go live your life to the fullest & make those dreams of yours come true! :D
Also, don’t do drugs. Yes, they helped me open my heart, mind, & soul to something new and wonderful about this world. But I have not done illegal drugs since I was 22 years old, and I never will. I am enough and so are you. So, don’t ever forget that! Now, go make those dreams come true! :)
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.davevescio.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davevescio
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dave.vescio2
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/davevescio
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/DaveVescio
Image Credits
All images were created by me – Dave Vescio