Roseline Koener: Cantate of Morning / Walter Wickiser Gallery: The New Abstractionists II: Opening Reception / 20100130.7D.02436.P1.CC / SML
Roseline Koener
Cantate of Morning
Tempera and ink on cardboard and paper
15" x 16", 2009
www.walterwickisergallery.com/pages/exhibitions/roseline_...
The Art Of Roseline Koener
“... as a painter I feel that I have in my possession the means of moving others in the direction in which I myself am driven ...”
- Paul Klee, On Modern Art
Her grandfather was a collector, her mother a painter: what did eleven-year-old Roseline Koener want for her twelfth birthday? Oil paints! The following Christmas, her first book on art history arrived, and every week thereafter a book on a different artist. Soon Roseline Koener was studying with the masters. Then came la Cambre (a school founded by members of the Bauhaus) which drew her away not only from the conservatism of her earliest efforts but from art-making itself. In its place she turned to archeology and art history, working after graduation at a succession of museums. Unfulfilled creativity prompted study abroad and travel: Dublin, San Francisco, New York... During this period she learned (from Manuel Neri) “to draw not from seeing, but from feeling”. It was the culture of Africa that transformed her truly. “Its color, fabric, texture” changed the Belgium-born artist into a world cosmopolitan. Roseline Koener’s art strikes one immediately with its color, patterned space and tactile qualities.
Koener’s Westhampton atelier presents the visitor with an array of objects -- ceramics, baskets, linens, paintings and sculptures. Only a shelf’s worth of big bottles of dry pigment divides her workspace from living quarters. The former teems with her works, as well as huge basketfuls of colored fabrics, colored papers, occult-evoking sculpture collections, books, music -- much of this evidence of the wide range of her interest in indigenous cultures.
Roseline Koener’s work process tends to the spontaneous; her media -- fabric and paper foremost among them -- are arranged, layered, inserted, and glued together according to the dictates of color. Markings, dots, and lines then enrich her distinctively beautiful tonal field, bringing into play her highly-developed drawing sense and command of painting technique, until the fragments merge into the single new piece.
Koener’s colors –- her blue, pink, yellow, and green blended with pink and green, purple and blue – make for strong visual poetry; vibrant and intense. She creates them by mixing dry pigment with egg white and an emulsifier, or, alternatively, the dry pigment with ink. The dots or freely drawn lines guide us beyond these exuberant colors into the colors within.
Intellect plus depth of understanding, combined with force of impulse and spontaneity -- all together constitute this artist’s distinctiveness. Her experiences both intellectual and emotional, her biography of courageous embracings and of castings-off, all these have been translated into her work, which guides and pulls us toward her.
“To see the different beauty, to encounter the soul of the world, to discover the universal humanity”, Roseline Koener travels frequently, in-between stints as educator and working artist. Her ultimate goal as artist is to evoke spirituality through the illuminating light of her colors. It should be no surprise that she counts Matisse and Rothko among the artists that enchant her most.
Willo Doe
Art Critic
Willo Doe is the author of numerous catalogues and essays. In addition, she has written extensively for many art journals.
Roseline Koener: Cantate of Morning / Walter Wickiser Gallery: The New Abstractionists II: Opening Reception / 20100130.7D.02436.P1.CC / SML
Roseline Koener
Cantate of Morning
Tempera and ink on cardboard and paper
15" x 16", 2009
www.walterwickisergallery.com/pages/exhibitions/roseline_...
The Art Of Roseline Koener
“... as a painter I feel that I have in my possession the means of moving others in the direction in which I myself am driven ...”
- Paul Klee, On Modern Art
Her grandfather was a collector, her mother a painter: what did eleven-year-old Roseline Koener want for her twelfth birthday? Oil paints! The following Christmas, her first book on art history arrived, and every week thereafter a book on a different artist. Soon Roseline Koener was studying with the masters. Then came la Cambre (a school founded by members of the Bauhaus) which drew her away not only from the conservatism of her earliest efforts but from art-making itself. In its place she turned to archeology and art history, working after graduation at a succession of museums. Unfulfilled creativity prompted study abroad and travel: Dublin, San Francisco, New York... During this period she learned (from Manuel Neri) “to draw not from seeing, but from feeling”. It was the culture of Africa that transformed her truly. “Its color, fabric, texture” changed the Belgium-born artist into a world cosmopolitan. Roseline Koener’s art strikes one immediately with its color, patterned space and tactile qualities.
Koener’s Westhampton atelier presents the visitor with an array of objects -- ceramics, baskets, linens, paintings and sculptures. Only a shelf’s worth of big bottles of dry pigment divides her workspace from living quarters. The former teems with her works, as well as huge basketfuls of colored fabrics, colored papers, occult-evoking sculpture collections, books, music -- much of this evidence of the wide range of her interest in indigenous cultures.
Roseline Koener’s work process tends to the spontaneous; her media -- fabric and paper foremost among them -- are arranged, layered, inserted, and glued together according to the dictates of color. Markings, dots, and lines then enrich her distinctively beautiful tonal field, bringing into play her highly-developed drawing sense and command of painting technique, until the fragments merge into the single new piece.
Koener’s colors –- her blue, pink, yellow, and green blended with pink and green, purple and blue – make for strong visual poetry; vibrant and intense. She creates them by mixing dry pigment with egg white and an emulsifier, or, alternatively, the dry pigment with ink. The dots or freely drawn lines guide us beyond these exuberant colors into the colors within.
Intellect plus depth of understanding, combined with force of impulse and spontaneity -- all together constitute this artist’s distinctiveness. Her experiences both intellectual and emotional, her biography of courageous embracings and of castings-off, all these have been translated into her work, which guides and pulls us toward her.
“To see the different beauty, to encounter the soul of the world, to discover the universal humanity”, Roseline Koener travels frequently, in-between stints as educator and working artist. Her ultimate goal as artist is to evoke spirituality through the illuminating light of her colors. It should be no surprise that she counts Matisse and Rothko among the artists that enchant her most.
Willo Doe
Art Critic
Willo Doe is the author of numerous catalogues and essays. In addition, she has written extensively for many art journals.