Kari Bienert
Kari Bienert is an Australian Colour field painter with a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the University of South Australia. She grew up in the Adelaide hills, South Australia, and over the last 20 years has travelled and painted extensively in the U.S. and Europe (France, England, Italy and Greece), she has just returned to Australia after four years in Asia (Malaysia). Kari’s practice is inspired by both the magic of the organic world from the macro and micro levels as well as the influence of technology on the way we visualize and understand reality.
Sourcing inspiration from within, she dives into her abstract world, articulating her adventures with undulating colours, shapes and patterns. A studio based artist, she works primarily with oil on canvas, in which her labor-intensive and intuitive process produce brightly coloured, sometimes tactile paintings that can also be sculptural. Oils prepared studiously before their application, by combining a number of paints, are carefully applied in a practice governed by abstract rules and introspective negotiations. Avoiding prior digital sketches, Kari relies on quick decisions and instinct. The process is a balance between physical motor skills and mental power, in which the brush becoming more than a tool, is an extension of her body that is intuitively guided by the beat of her heart, as well as the quiet melody in her head.
Kari’s visual language implies the pixilation of the organic world. Working in a similar vein as individuals with synesthesia and inspired by Op art, Colour Field paintings and Lyrical Abstraction, she weaves visual poetry that sings her inner world, populated by strange protagonists and perplexing landscapes. Elementary geometric shapes such as triangles and rectangles and magnified single-celled microorganisms thrive harmoniously in the same graphic plane. The visual rhythms conjured through formal arrangements of shapes are somehow simultaneously organic and artificial, bringing to mind the movement of natural energies as well as the pace of fast-moving urban commercial signage. With energetic allover compositions, her scenes appear as though they expand beyond the boundaries of the picture frame, making reference to both the expansive universe and the mysterious microscopic realm.
Please tell us more about your background and how you started creating art?
My mum was a painter and science teacher, Dad a mathematician. My family gave me a love of learning and a yearning to know myself. I loved art, tennis, literature, film, friends, and laughter. I went to university to study film and came out a very determined painter with a life vision and a degree in Visual Arts.
What does your art aim to say to the viewers?
I don’t have a specific aim for the viewer when creating each work, but I do always receive an emotional response from sharing my work with others which brings me closer to my audience and a sense that my paintings are touching souls.
I see that my works are mirrors of what is evolving on the planet. Each work is layered with my own life, stories, moments, dreams, and patterns then slowly threaded together with the greater collective. Patterns in nature, technology and our own DNA are interlinked. Painting gives me the freedom to co create with a vibrant inner world reflecting to me a future for our world beyond sensationalism.
Do you have an essential philosophy that guides you in your creative expression?
Spirituality has always been at the centre of all my life experience. I seek to live by my intuition, my heart, my spirit. Since I was a kid I searched for the bigger meaning to life, a world view more expansive than what the material world could offer. From a teenager I sought what my “destiny” was. I am so blessed to find it in colour, oils, images, paintings…the life of the mystic and artist is fulfilling. There have been many sacrifices and challenges along the way, painting in laundries and old sheds, surviving a myriad of emotional landscapes that only painting could get me through and still does.
The idea of being an older person with my entire history in paintings gives me a sense of peace.
What art marketing activity do you put into practice regularly that works most successfully for you?
I am not a natural marketer for my work. Over many years now I spend time like a disciplined tortoise, gathering, reaching out, photographing, uploading, seeking, and sorting. I am naturally determined and keep going, small actions every day can build empires.
As Tilda Swinton wrote in a recent Vogue Magazine,
“I have never been invested in the concept of a career. My interest has always been, and continues to be in, in the leading of a life”.
I paint because it is my life.
Can you tell us about the process of creating your work?
My painting practice is a slow, rhythmical, meditative process of mixing many oil colours together to produce a unique palette. One colour maybe a mixture of 25 different oil paints. I very rarely use paint straight from the tube.
Once the background is hand drawn (I do not use a computer at any stage of my practice) I use many different brushes according to the work. A thin, long bristle brush for the thick textured works where precision and constancy are foremost. These heavy paintings take many weeks to complete and months to dry. A shorter wider bristle brush is used for works when applying thin layers of paint. The accuracy and placement of different colours on the canvas is purely intuitive. I become part of a co-creative inner dance between my inner vision and brushstroke.
There is a three-dimensional effect to my work which makes the flat picture plane vibrate. This adds a “sense of consciousness “which brings an encompassing energetic connection with the viewer.
The inter relationship of thousands of colours and shapes in my paintings can produce either a dynamic kaleidoscopic effect or a calm and more undulating experience.
How much planning goes into each artwork?
I see the works in mediations and dreams and the corner of my eye and halfway between sleep and waking. I clearly see the vision, sometimes I will do plans and sketches but mostly I dive in with the image crystal in my mind. I must trust explicitly as to how to execute each tiny part of the painting as it wont work if I don’t listen within. Sometimes I get stuck, I stop and walk then return to the easel later.
What is the essential element in your art?
Colour and geometry, -ENERGY. I am fascinated the world is made up of vibrating atoms with distinct patterns and code. Energy is at the core of everything. Every infinite colour vibrates to its own rhythm. There is magic to number systems, and I collaborate with colour, music and shape to make energetic poetry on canvas. When I paint, I experience synesthesia.
What is your daily routine when creating art?
I am so inspired in the morning. I wake up 530am and meditate. I see lots of visions and paintings in meditation and can hear my soul. It gets busier after that getting my children ready for school. After one hour of some sort of exercise I am in my home studio until afternoon. I can jump into an alternate world easily where ideas, visions, day dreams and imagination are my world.
I very much like working on my own but have had studios with other artists many times. Music is like air to me; I listen whilst painting. Classical music and composers, (both modern and historic) like Phillip Glass, Arvo Part, Elena Kats-Chernin, Peter Sculthorpe, Brian Eno, John Adams, David Darling, Eric Whitacre, Wagner, Debussy, Puccini and Hidegaard Von Bingen are some of my favourites. I love music from different decades like Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, Eddie Vedor, Kate Miller-Heidke, Birdy, Aretha Franklin, Carole King, Lizzo and Lady Gaga. There are millions more. I am currently listening to the audio book, The Mists of Avalon about King Arthur, written by Marion Zimmer Bradley. I am reading “People come First”, the Alice Neel biography.
