Website

http://www.carolynkrieg.com

Relationship status

married

College / University

ucsb

Program

french language and linguistics

Member type

Artist

If you're an artist, what kind of art do you make?

Digital, Drawing, Painting, Photography, Printmaking

I am...

a West coast artist. I started exhibiting in my mid-thirties and have had 45 solo or two person shows in the last 20 years, including Seattle Art Museum; Art Museum Missoula, Montana; William Reagh Los Angeles Photography Center; Sun Valley Arts Center, Idaho; Dahl Fine Arts Center, Rapid City, South Dakota; and Goddard Center for Visual and Performing Arts, Oklahoma.

My work is in several museums including the Biblioteque National in Paris; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Seattle Art Museum; University of Alaska Museum, Missoula Art Museum and Portland Art Museum.

I was recently given artist residencies in Newfoundland and Portugal. My public projects include work for the Seattle Arts Commission and Washington State Arts Commission Art in Public Places Programs, Eastern Washington University Press, King County Public Art Program and Seattle City Light Portable Works.

About my artwork

I think about light a lot and death --the sensuality of life, people, humor, irony.

I start with photography and may layer and erase drawing, painting and resins –it can be a lengthy process, creating a history with each piece-light leaking, emotional and sensorial. My thematic focus: the necessary tension of opposites.

The fauna are symbols of different awareness, but I also see them as totem-like; similar to the art relic objects, which I see as also presenting the question of how iconic figures affect awareness; similar to the people, whom I also see as influenced by their surrounding landscape/flora in their being or becoming.
Their meaning for me is plant-like.

I take my images through generations of positive and negative before a final print because I am interested in:
-- noting what is behind what we see
-- influencing of the unconscious on the conscious
-- considering the light and the dark
I use unique color and oils and inks because I am interested in:
-- color influencing response
-- creating a history
My formal compositions reflect my love of Renaissance, Surrealistic and Romantic art.

I use animal imagery, thinking about the “messages” passed between creatures of different awareness (Fauna / Horse series). Fauna is also a note to the diminished siren call of the wild and its habitat. The horse series is also a nod to an unbridled power combined with a heightened awareness of every sense.

The Snapshot / Inside Out series uses personal and family snapshots. I am addressing the emotional/psychological/physiological interplay of intimates/self.

Traveling in India, Africa, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, source the Relic / Memory Map series. Beauty and its edge - fragments, textiles, scars, patterns, tiles become layers in a piece. I think about the psyche’s encounter with duplicity, the cycle of decay and renewal, the relentless assimilation of individuals and civilizations.

I see art as proceeding from collective memory.

My work is a form of continuous prayer--
"(God) is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse." C.G. Jung, Letters, vol.2, p.525


On Process: The structure of my process has its own metaphoric possibilities. The combination of steps varies with each piece (mixing media, cameras and films), but in general begins with my conventional chemical or digital photograph. I then generate a Polacolor print from the digital file, and tear off the pelicule, a positive transparency, which I paint and draw on with oil and ink and then use in place of a negative in a traditional color enlarger. I print on archival chromogenic paper then sometimes transfer the print and/or transparency onto canvas or board or Plexiglas and work further with acrylics and resins. Mine is a willful process-- I can show my hand by drawing, painting, erasing, sanding, tearing, cutting and digitally manipulating. This allows for fictional gain and generational loss, similar to what happens when experience moves from perception to memory. It reflects the psychological process of teasing meaning from mystery. Figures can take on an iconic or archetypical status, their surroundings not a specific place but a kind of atmosphere.

Artists I like

Bosch, El Greco, Velasquez have always fascinated me.
Some live/dead artists that have influenced and informed me: Jasper Johns' philosophy, Chagall's whimsy, Ryder's darkness, Vuillard's painting, William Blake, period. Locally: Glenn Rudolph's vision; Fay Jones' stories; Jim Lavadour's emotion; Jim Kraft's quiet/passionate geometry; Michael Spafford's myth; Mark Calderon's soul work; Lauren Grossman's intellectual religion. On a national level, for their translations of the animal kingdom: Susan Rothenberg, Deborah Butterfield, and William Wegman.

Interests

Much inspiration comes from reading fiction, myth, poetry and psychology. Where I live and with whom I live, both people and animals, how I spend time when I'm not "doing" art --all this parallels my work and in some way affects what I do. Much time is spent riding horses, traveling and photographing.

The subject matter of my first work was Horse.

What exhibitions are good at the moment?

Seattle Art Museum's "Gates of Paradise" (Ghiberti)

The centre of the artworld is

nowhere and everywhere