Heidi DaehlerHeidi DaehlerHeidi Daehler
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My relationship with painting is intuitive and process-oriented. I use images as starting points, often photographs of people I know, and select those that resonate with me. Sometimes I collage several images together. In search of accents or elements, I am drawn to sparkling lights, jewels, fur, fabric, hair, make-up, hands, ears, faces of all sorts (buses and trains are rich mines for ideas). I have crushes on colours, and I am always curious about what paint can do, physically and metaphorically. I enjoy working with my hands in such a tactile, embodied medium; to touch a thing and to represent it in paint are connected.
I am particularly drawn to the physicality of paint, its anachronistic or contradictory slowness in the context of our increasingly digital times. Painting does not admit of speed; it extends time, forces us to slow down, to tarry and look. It is also a balancing act of control against chaos, of beauty interrupted by ugly, awkward moments. I strain to rock the boat where control and beauty are concerned, though I am drawn to these things, too.
As I work, a story begins to unfold, and I can make all kinds of connections—with memories or with dreams, but also with wider, more universal issues. I usually make representational paintings, mostly of people and animals; yet although I work figuratively, I also find myself thinking about expressionism and seeking ways to build abstraction into my work.
I am interested in more than merely replicating any individual subject’s appearance; I also aim to evoke situational or emotional states. My most recent work, for instance, is rooted in conceptions of failure, solitude, vulnerability, sublimation, obliteration, resilience, and rebirth. In seeking to invoke these states, I employ a crash-and-burn approach. I charge in, fast and reckless, creating misfits, even monsters. Then often I feel I need to go back in and redeem them, to save what can be saved, to destroy and to reconstruct. And in the end, they become characters with their own stories, ready to form relationships with the viewer independent of wishes or purposes of my own.My relationship with painting is intuitive and process-oriented. I use images as starting points, often photographs of people I know, and select those that resonate with me. Sometimes I collage several images together. In search of accents or elements, I am drawn to sparkling lights, jewels, fur, fabric, hair, make-up, hands, ears, faces of all sorts (buses and trains are rich mines for ideas). I have crushes on colours, and I am always curious about what paint can do, physically and metaphorically. I enjoy working with my hands in such a tactile, embodied medium; to touch a thing and to represent it in paint are connected.
I am particularly drawn to the physicality of paint, its anachronistic or contradictory slowness in the context of our increasingly digital times. Painting does not admit of speed; it extends time, forces us to slow down, to tarry and look. It is also a balancing act of control against chaos, of beauty interrupted by ugly, awkward moments. I strain to rock the boat where control and beauty are concerned, though I am drawn to these things, too.
As I work, a story begins to unfold, and I can make all kinds of connections—with memories or with dreams, but also with wider, more universal issues. I usually make representational paintings, mostly of people and animals; yet although I work figuratively, I also find myself thinking about expressionism and seeking ways to build abstraction into my work.
I am interested in more than merely replicating any individual subject’s appearance; I also aim to evoke situational or emotional states. My most recent work, for instance, is rooted in conceptions of failure, solitude, vulnerability, sublimation, obliteration, resilience, and rebirth. In seeking to invoke these states, I employ a crash-and-burn approach. I charge in, fast and reckless, creating misfits, even monsters. Then often I feel I need to go back in and redeem them, to save what can be saved, to destroy and to reconstruct. And in the end, they become characters with their own stories, ready to form relationships with the viewer independent of wishes or purposes of my own.My relationship with painting is intuitive and process-oriented. I use images as starting points, often photographs of people I know, and select those that resonate with me. Sometimes I collage several images together. In search of accents or elements, I am drawn to sparkling lights, jewels, fur, fabric, hair, make-up, hands, ears, faces of all sorts (buses and trains are rich mines for ideas). I have crushes on colours, and I am always curious about what paint can do, physically and metaphorically. I enjoy working with my hands in such a tactile, embodied medium; to touch a thing and to represent it in paint are connected.
I am particularly drawn to the physicality of paint, its anachronistic or contradictory slowness in the context of our increasingly digital times. Painting does not admit of speed; it extends time, forces us to slow down, to tarry and look. It is also a balancing act of control against chaos, of beauty interrupted by ugly, awkward moments. I strain to rock the boat where control and beauty are concerned, though I am drawn to these things, too.
As I work, a story begins to unfold, and I can make all kinds of connections—with memories or with dreams, but also with wider, more universal issues. I usually make representational paintings, mostly of people and animals; yet although I work figuratively, I also find myself thinking about expressionism and seeking ways to build abstraction into my work.
I am interested in more than merely replicating any individual subject’s appearance; I also aim to evoke situational or emotional states. My most recent work, for instance, is rooted in conceptions of failure, solitude, vulnerability, sublimation, obliteration, resilience, and rebirth. In seeking to invoke these states, I employ a crash-and-burn approach. I charge in, fast and reckless, creating misfits, even monsters. Then often I feel I need to go back in and redeem them, to save what can be saved, to destroy and to reconstruct. And in the end, they become characters with their own stories, ready to form relationships with the viewer independent of wishes or purposes of my own.
