Kurt Seidel

My most common method of approach is to start with any color, to choose no specific shape and let the next color(s) come into play. When I see colors and forms beginning to interact and connect, I continue the process of paint over, fill, scrape off, wash off and scratch, paint over, while in my mind's eye I see the harmony and disharmony developing the right balance. Thus the painting evolves. My method of painting is characterized by swiftness, concentration and spontaneity. The paintings spring into life in a tense, inspiring, and at the same time sometimes frustrating and exhausting process. Often there are changes on the path to the right "sound" of colors. Painting for me is a process with no projected end state besides one: finally, there will be a picture!

In February 2009, when viewing my first bigger blue painting, the idea of something like the meditative in painting came into my mind: when the painting is flowing as if out of itself, with the painting developing out of me interacting with the painting. This is what Jackson Pollock must have felt when portraying this state of working as an easy give and take happening within the artist and his work. I think for me it would be difficult to find an expression to better describe what is going on when I am really painting. I communicate, I interact with the evolving piece, and each new addition of paint makes a new change which itself necessitates and causes the next step. This is a process going on until the piece is transformed into a painting.

The lucky part of painting is the easy flow of work, as one may imagine. The less lucky part, inseparable from the lucky one, is the sometimes extensive journey until the enigma of the picture comes into existence. This journey can be described as meandering around, dragging on and on, fighting for a solution and bordering to despair. When I paint as I know I should try to paint, I am not trying to paint something special, some concrete imagination. When I am painting right, when I am painting as I have to paint, I am searching for something I do not see when I start, but that I am sure I will find on my way, sometime, somehow.

The easy flow may last quite a while, giving the perfect feeling to do the right thing. But more often, it is a shorter period of time, for example when finally things prove that they fit together, requiring only minor but decisive and final changes. Then the work is about to be done!

Do I have any examples, any idols for my painting? No, I have not. It is about colors and forms, it is about movement while painting and movement in the painting and it is about developing a painting while painting. There is a beginning, and obviously there must be an end. The beginning is the first stroke with brush or spatula, any color, any form, or maybe some leftover from any former work. And then the process begins to move, accelerates, slows down, and seems to stop, to reverse, to change directions and to accelerate again. Finally something begins to form, to compose, to get coherence. All the forms and colors begin to unite: they form a painting.

Kurt’s Acrylics

 

Untitled 200705

 

Untitled 20071200

 

Untitled 20080117

 

Untitled 20080526

 

Untitled 20080810

 

Untitled 20081116

 

Untitled 200810003

 

Untitled 20090215

 

Untitled 20090316

 

Untitled 20090405

 

Untitled 200800916

 

Untitled 20090501