WenderVista began with a habit of looking. For years I traveled the world for work — selling analog chips in an increasingly digital one — and everywhere I went I kept a private collection of places that stopped me. A glacial lake above Misurina the afternoon a storm cleared. Mount Rainier appearing out the car window on the road to a meeting. Hot chocolate in a small kitchen above a harbour in Iceland. Courting my wife in Cades Cove, the first weekend the leaves turned.
Wender Studios is the family studio those places became. We make ceramic art tiles — not prints, not posters — of anywhere there is beauty in the world. The artwork is slowly infused into the surface of the tile under high heat and pressure, by hand, and rests beneath a glossy finish that makes the colour look lit from within. The result is weighty and permanent. A piece you hand down, not one that yellows in a frame.
I'm not a painter in the old sense. I'm a curator — an eye. I find the places, I shape how each one is seen, and I finish every tile myself before it leaves Knoxville. The atlas grows because I am relentless about looking; the quality holds because nothing ships that I haven't held in my own hands.
Every vista starts with a place worth stopping for — chosen, composed, and shaped until the artwork does what the place did to you.
The artwork is slowly infused into the tile’s surface under high heat and pressure, so the colour lives inside the surface, not on top of it. It can’t fade or peel.
Each tile is checked, backed, and mounted by hand in our Knoxville studio, then packed and shipped to your wall in about ten days.