Art is a manifestation of the artist’s subjective reality. Likewise, the interpretation of art is unique in the subjective experience of the viewer. Why then, should the viewer’s personal perception be tainted by preconception?
Askild Winkelmann’s paintings are intimate reflections of emotions and experiences translated onto canvas through an intuitive dialogue between artist and medium. At the same time, an absence of detailed descriptions invites the viewer to discover their own emotions and experiences in the artwork in front of them.
Winkelmann begins her creative process with premeditated themes, colours and designs, but then enters a fluid dialogue with her work, which blends the impacts of conscious and subconscious expression. The artist treats colours and paint as living elements, conversation partners with the power to supplant initial intention. She purposefully relinquishes control to allow colours to take on a life of their own, interacting, merging, colliding with each other in unexpected recombinations.
By selectively surrendering conscious control, Winkelmann permits her subconscious to directly connect with the paint on the canvas. The creative process thereby becomes a translation of the artist’s thoughts and emotions. Always created in isolation, her works are deeply intimate contemplations, informed only by the artists internalisation of the external world. In this cathartic process, the artist embraces vulnerability in expressing and working through personal experiences as well as her reflections on wider societal issues.
This requires an openness to change and fluidity; emotions can be fleeting, experiences traumatic in one moment and informative the next. As Winkelmann’s artworks are created, the iterations along the way may therefore display different emotional facets of the same experience. They may draw close in embrace in one moment and push away in repulsion the next. These layers can be observed in the final work depending on angle, detail or light source – many of Winkelmann’s works reveal an entire second face when observed under UV light.
The push and pull of competing emotions in the form of different layers, colours and mediums give Winkelmann’s works a dynamism which transcends the static moment. Her paintings are in constant flux, injected with the vibrancy and movement of the creative process itself. They can convey restlessness and tranquillity at once, depending on the viewer and focus. This multiplicity highlights the uniqueness of individual experiences and how we process them. Winkelmann’s work thereby poses questions around how we understand our own emotions, how we express them and what they can teach us about ourselves.
Viewers are invited to speculate about the artist’s intentions and thoughts behind each work. The real impact, however, emerges from their own emotional confrontation with them. In contemplating meaning, viewers engage with their own emotions and experience a vulnerability analogous to that of the artist during the creative process. The viewers eventual interpretations are therefore as much an opportunity to learn about themselves as they are about the artist.
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