From the time he was a boy, Vaadia did chores on the rural family farm and dreamt about art. School awakened him to the world of art and in time, he would travel by bus alone to attend art classes in a town some distance away. He became familiar with the incredible ancient treasures of his homeland including architecture and sculpture. He eventually worked on the restoration of some of these structures during breaks while serving in the army. Vaadia’s memories of his early years in Israel as a struggling artist form a strong personal identity about his origins and the connection of his art to his roots and his love and respect of nature.
Having exhibited the series of his early fetishistic works during his first years in New York, Vaadia began working with bulky rectangular slabs of bluestone and slimmer pieces of discarded slate roofing tiles that he rescued by the dozens from the dumpsters in SoHo. To Boaz, finding such a cache of usable stone was at once triumphant and prophetic. Once he undertook developing the sculptural approach he would use, he realized that working with such sedimentary materials linked him personally and spiritually back to the earth. Not long after this, the debut of his distinctive figurative work in stacked stone was on view at Ivan Karp’s SoHo gallery. Vaadia never looked back.