Q&A with Roxanna Walitzki: Finding Transcendence
Academic nerd that I am, it took me a long time to realize that if you want to be an artist, you don’t have to wait for permission or achieve some set amount of training. You can just, you know, do it [insert emoji of brain exploding!]. I’m in awe of people who boldly make what they want to make in whatever medium feels right, and who bravely follow their instincts to see where they go. Roxanna Walitzki is one fearless artist who does exactly this.
I met Roxanna Walitzki in a collaborative art song class at New York University way back in my past life as an undergraduate piano student, and I’ve been inspired by her ever since. Classically trained as a mezzo-soprano, Roxanna integrates elements from electronic and ambient music into her art-song arrangements, and uses video to further the reach of classical music. After studying music at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and NYU, Roxanna expanded her art-making to photography, modeling and producing. As a multidisciplinary artist, Roxanna has performed in Berlin at the Urban National Museum, in Finland, Croatia, and the Czech Republic, and she’s participated in the AARK Archipelago Art Residency in Finland and a Glass Art Box experiment in Portugal. Her environment-focused photography and video collaborations with her sibling Redd Walitzki have been published in HUF Magazine, Shuba Magazine, POZA Magazine, Feroce Magazine and more.
Roxanna talked to me about how she became interested in a variety of mediums and why she likes chance and chaos in her art-making. Experimentation is a core part of her process, which often centers around discovering the “little moments that work” and building on them. (Sounds a lot like writing, yeah?)
Q&A with Roxanna Walitzki, classical singer/photographer/producer/model
Q: How did you get started as an artist? What has your journey into all these different modes of expression been like?
A: It definitely started with music. My parents encouraged creativity a lot when me and my sibling were children. In high school I learned that I just really loved singing. I sang in a lot of choirs and I had this whole dream of becoming—at the time—a pop star. I was like, “I want to do performance and that looks really fun!” So my mom encouraged me to start taking voice lessons. I had a really fantastic first voice teacher who introduced me to classical music and, in particular, German art songs. I’m from Germany originally so I really connected with the language and the poetry and how words were set to music. And then I also connected with the feeling of singing in a classical manner, where your whole body is engaged and vibrating with the music, and that took over my life. I was like, “This is what I want to do.”
I went on to study classical singing in undergrad and grad school, and really thought that I would be on the classical opera track for the rest of my life. But then, pretty quickly after graduating from NYU, I realized that the traditional way of doing things isn’t exactly in line with what I wanted, so I started seeking unconventional performance opportunities. Seattle at the time had, and still does have, a really vibrant art scene. There’s lots of galleries and active artists that are painting and creating work, so I started performing at gallery openings. And then I kind of transformed from there, where I’d want to do more exciting—to me—performance-based things. I started incorporating video projections and eventually started layering electronic music techniques in with classical music and transforming it that way.
At the same time, I started getting more interested in creating my own visuals. I was living in kind of a warehouse artist space that had all this room to start playing with photography, so I’d just be in my little studio, set up a camera and lights and see what I could do. So that became interlinked with music just through experimentation. Sometimes it feels like there are two distinct things or several distinct things that I do, and sometimes it feels like the same thing—it’s all just a means of expressing yourself and seeing how you can create with your body and with your imagination.
Q: In terms of balancing being a musician and a photographer, what are the differences for you? For example, are there limitations to photography that you feel like you need music for or vice versa?
A: I don’t know that I feel limitations in either of those. It’s more about what I’m drawn to in a given moment. Whether making sound or making imagery, there are different creative catalysts for those things. Sometimes I feel really eager to take up space in a musical way and be loud and make sound, and other times I just want to be more visually expressive. I do a lot of photography in nature, and I have less of a desire to make music in nature. Every once in a while, I’m in a beautiful place and I’m like, “Oh, the acoustics here seem really interesting,” like in a cave or something, but more often than not I get inspired visually by nature rather than musically.
Q: Is there a balance to how your creative time is spent? For example, does every day need to have some time with music and then with photography? Or are there periods that are more music heavy or vice versa?
A: For a lot of years, I would say basically until mid-pandemic, the main driving force in my life was these creative things—making music and visuals. And for the last two and a half years, they don’t feel like the thing that I want to spend all of my time on. I’m in a period of quietly, slowly getting back to it. It is extremely important to me to be a creative person and to express myself in those ways, but it’s less like, “Every day I want to be in the studio making something” anymore. Enjoying and finding new ways to spend my time, which, when I fully return to making art my focus, I think will influence it in a new and interesting way and it might look completely different. I’d say at this point, I do still try to balance my time between doing photography and music, but it’s not so structured. It’s more like, “When I feel like doing these things, I will do them,” but I have less of the drive of like, “I need to create something new! I need to put a new project out!” It’s less structured.
Q: It sounds like you’re good at listening to yourself and knowing what you want to do, rather than just doing something because you feel like you have to. Is that something you’ve learned or has that always been the case for you?
A: I think I learned pretty quickly, especially after graduating, that if you want to do music or art you have to be your own boss. No one’s going to tell you to do this thing or the next thing. No one’s going to seek you out. You really have to be in charge of all of that yourself. And yeah, I think you learn a lot as a person about what you want. For me, that was realizing I don’t actually want to go to auditions all the time and try to be in shows. It looked more like, “Oh, if there’s something that sounds really exciting to me, I’ll try to put my whole self into it and try to make it an exciting and different experience for anyone that’s there.” And then over time I guess I realized that, or I’m currently in a phase where I’m less hungry for it. You really have to fight for every opportunity as an artist and make yourself known and continue to push that ball. The striving and the hunger are a little bit more muted for me these days.
Q: When you’re in performance mode, do you feel performance anxiety?
A: Yeah, performance anxiety has definitely come up for me over the years. Especially after being in school for so long, I had a phase of really struggling with it for no good reason. I think being in music school is a great experience in many ways, but then you’re—as you know—you’re constantly performing for peers and there’s a constant supportive-but-critical thing that happens when everybody’s trying to compete for opportunities and analyze technique and all of those things. So I struggled with it for a while after graduating. I had to focus on relaxation techniques before performing, and also trying to internalize the fact that not everyone is listening in the way where they’re critiquing you. People are actually looking to enjoy the performance and chances are they will.
Q: That took me a long time to figure out. Like, “Oh, not every person in this audience is a music expert!” Do you ever feel that kind of anxiety in the photography or modeling settings? Or does that feel separate?
A: It feels really separate. I’ve never had any formal training in photography (or modeling, of course) and I’ve worried about it less. In both photography and music, I’ve come to a point where the technical side of things means a little bit less to me than the expressive side. So like, in photography I don’t have a problem shooting and editing an image if, say, it’s a little bit underexposed or there’s a little bit of grain. That doesn’t bother me if it’s really expressive and really evocative. And same with music, I care more about the emotion behind it rather than everything being the most perfect, polished thing that it can be.
Q: Your self-portraits are so epic. Is there a lot of planning involved? Is it more experimental?
A: There’s usually a little bit of planning involved but, in all of my creative outlets, I really like a lot of chance and chaos to play a role. I can set out with an idea of what I’d like to create and then I always end up with something completely different based on the factors that are at play. I love a lot of wind in photography, where things are moving and it feels fluid and dynamic. And same with producing music, sometimes those little accidental sounds that you’ll make when manipulating will be like, “Oh, that’s great! That has to be a part of this.” With photography it’s taken a lot of experimentation. I usually just set out by myself and then set up a tripod and have a system with a remote where I experiment a lot and build upon little moments that work. Like, “Oh, that was going somewhere so now I know that’s the direction I’d like to work on improving.”
Q: That sounds a lot like writing. The exploration on the page is so important. Can you talk about your sibling collaborations as an artist duo with Redd Walitzki?
A: We’re not actively doing it at the moment because Redd has become a full-time motorcycle nomad and has been in Central America for the last six months. But we spent a lot of time traveling together and we would find bits of trash, material that was really visually inspiring to us. We would construct garments out of that and do photography and video projects in nature or in abandoned sites in Europe, to highlight the things that people leave behind and what impact that has on the environment. And transforming trash into something beautiful was really inspiring to both of us.
Working with Redd is always the easiest collaborative process, where we each have a similar but different enough view of things that it always leads to a really interesting end product, where it’s not exactly what I would create on my own or what Redd would create on their own, but easily fused together in a way that was very exciting. Whenever we are together, there’s some kind of creative project that just naturally happens.
Q: What advice do you have for people looking to embark on a new creative endeavor?
A: Try it, spend some time experimenting and failing—especially early on, you’re going to create things that you don’t love but it’s all part of the process. And then really focus on what fulfills you and excites you and don’t be afraid to switch gears and let that thing change over time. You don’t have to be locked into a certain way of doing things. It will be more exciting for everyone if you’re doing exactly what you love. That’s how the best art is made.
Q: What part of the creative process brings you the most joy?
A: I get the most fulfillment when I’m really in a moment, when I’m really in an experience and I feel like I’m flowing with it and I’m in that transcendent space of not worrying about what the product is, but just letting it be what it wants to be. I think art has this incredible way to take us out of the everyday world and make everything else kind of fall away. That moment when you’re actively creating and nothing else matters—for me that’s the most exciting part.
You can follow Roxanna’s gorgeous photography on her Instagram and learn more about her art and music on her website.
Check out the album trailer for Roxanna’s album Amor Fati, which features experimental arrangements of music by J. S. Bach and Vivaldi.
For writer-readers, Kim Pittaway wrote about lessons in memoir from self-portraiture (with prompts!) for Brevity: “Every painter paints himself.”