photo: CANDRA GEORGE mycreativereality.com
Jed Malitz doesn’t consider himself an inventor. But he is. He tries to explain away his talent, saying it’s simply a marriage of computer skills and 3D photography. But it isn’t. Jed Malitz is a genius—a visionary—whose artistic innovation is intrinsically connected to his spiritual metamorphosis. As a child growing up in Boulder, Colorado, Malitz limited his art to pen and pencil—eschewing color and crayons. Spiritually, his family was just as colorless. Although they identified themselves as Reform Jew, the truth is, his parents and brother were closer to being atheist. There was little mention of a deity in their home. “I’ve always felt as if there were something missing,” he says, “a hole inside of me.” As a young man, his work couldn’t fill the void. As a biotechnology computing specialist on the West Coast, he was dedicated to his job but never enjoyed it. “It was only a means to a paycheck,” he admits. But it did put him in the right place at the right time. While on assignment in Seattle, he met his soulmate and future wife, Sophia Omoro. “She was the most exquisitely beautiful woman I’d ever seen,” he recalls. She was in a bookstore reading about robotic surgery. Considering himself savvy in the field, he proceeded to explain it to her. To his embarrassment, she told him she was a doctor and, yes, she was quite familiar with the subject. They chatted. He gave her his phone number, and she stole his heart. After Katrina struck, she returned to New Orleans to complete her residency. Jed accompanied her. Working remotely in IT consulting for clients in Seattle, he was always on call. “My resentment toward my job grew,” he says, “but that didn’t dampen my desire to be creative.” Channeling his artistic talent, Jed began working on a series using some of his favorite photos. Printed on brushed aluminum, No One’s Ark features a nautical image that blends
seamlessly with the metal. There is no horizon, no sky, no water. All were taken out of the picture via digital editing. “If you stand back and look, you can almost see the horizon. Your imagination fills it in,” Jed explains. Another work, Life on Mars uses a photo Jed had taken that originally featured hundreds of birds standing together. Removing most of the birds, he left only a line of pelicans on a sandspit. He then colorized their reflection in red tones, hence the reference to the red planet. 44 of You is a sculptural wall panel featuring 43 polished stainless steel ball bearings of various sizes floating on a background of torched acrylic resin. They reflect the viewer’s face. Jed enjoys it when visitors, thinking he miscounted, point out that there are only 43. Jed shows them their reflection in the shiny acrylic background. There really are 44. For a few years, Jed did well balancing his work with his artistic endeavors. Then something happened that changed his life forever. In mid-2010, Jed had a surreal dream—a dream with human forms made of floating ribbons. It so captivated him that he began a quest to recreate these ribbon-like forms in art. For six months, he tried to reproduce the flowing bodies using his computer savvy and artistic abilities, but to no avail. “I figured it was too difficult, so I gave up on the dream.” But the dream didn’t give up on him. A year later, the ethereal figures reappeared in another dream, igniting in the artist an unquenchable desire to bring this dream to life. “It’s all I thought about,” he says, his eyes twinkling, his voice enthusiastic. When he told Sophia he wanted to quit his job to create the human forms of floating ribbons, she replied whole-heartedly, “So DO it!” Free from the constraints of his former job, Jed worked relentlessly on the project. “The table was covered with papers filled with calculations and figures,” says Sophia. Despite >>
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