Letty, Lyndie, and Axel Irons at…
Since the initial concept of the Faces of Surfing, Nowak understood a strong method in capturing her subjects would be meeting them and photographing them in their own environments. "They are the most comfortable and they are in 'their' natural light," she says, "that light travels through each painting and their personalities and environment stays within my mind while I am making the piece." This theory started for Nowak even with her first portraits at Michigan State. "I could feel the Michigan light coming through and understood it very early on." She moved onto Key West and started her body of work, the Faces of Key West letting the sun of the Florida Keys create her tones, highlights, and shadows. "At first the light was very heavy in my paintings and I pushed a lot of contrast. The air in the Keys was heavier, the sun stronger, and colors had a richness I had yet to explore," she adds. Travel has been a relevant tool for some of the Faces of Surfing paintings as well. Rob Machado was of the first Nowak traveled to photogragh. The light in his painting is from his North County San Diego home. Currently she is working on both Lyndie Irons's and Donavon Frankenreiter's portrait. To photograph them, she made the trip to Kauai to capture the light and experience time with each of them.
