Artist Statement

I‘ve seriously considered painting a burden, though I do consider it my only means of understanding the world, and, in fact my only means of feeling at home in the world. I don’t know what I feel and think until I paint. Painting is my only means of bringing each day about – making peace with myself and creating a place in which I fit into. I try to turn my external environment into an inward reality – it’s one of the things that makes me – it takes from me and it gives to me.

The human figure is the vehicle with which I can most positively relate. I’m preoccupied, fascinated and curious about the solitariness and mysteriousness of human beings. The more developed my curiosity becomes, the more acute, the more complicated, complex and suggestive the world around people becomes. I am also driven and guided by sensory impressions: noise, color, texture, smell, shapes, expressions, tone, language and light.

I don’t approach the canvas with a particular image in my mind. I go to it with pigment in my hands and do something to that piece of material in front of me, then work almost at random until the image begins to assert itself. This action depends on the imponderable and I welcome the accidental – it creates an arena in which to act. The questions that I always ask are: what do you want to be, what do you want from me and what do you want me to do. Sometimes the painting becomes the answer – in other words, I am not trying to prove anything. I am the one who is learning. -Marianne Kolb