Interview With Stephanie Visser

Mysterium #1
Acrylic Mixed Media Collage on Paper 76" x 43"
Stephanie Visser

Stephanie Visser's intriguing abstracts explore the relationships of sunlight and shadows, stillness and movement, sound and quiet.

Which of these pieces was the most challenging to create or conceive?

Initially, these new pieces come from a surprise chemical reaction that occurred, when attempting to be frugal, I mixed regular house paint with dried acrylic paint and worked it over with sand paper. The first piece in this series was on a large unprimed canvas. The result of the experiment was a look and feel that was not typical of my process which I found exciting and intriguing. I had no idea as to how far I could take it and in what materials it would be the most successful.

If you had to swap being an artist for a separate role that you would commit to at the same capacity, what would it be?

That's an easy one for me since I would most likely recommit to my career as an interior designer. It always afforded me an opportunity to work with color and form in a three dimensional format and I found it challenging and rewarding as well as artistic.

What 3 things are most unlike you or your work?

I am not a painter or a person that is struggling to make social commentary in my work or in my life. I often see work I admire that is a composite of images with deep subconscious meaning. However, my work is more lyrical and emotional and does have subconscious meaning, but is less image related and more like a Rorschach ink blot than realistically interpretive.


Mysterium #8
Acrylic Mixed Media Collage on Paper 76 x 43"
Stephanie Visser

Does art serve a function beyond decorating walls?

I certainly hope so....even though in my other life I often am called upon to "decorate" walls. I most often preferred that people have the opportunity to have art around them that speaks to them at the deepest level, even if they did not have the desire to explore or understand why. For me, art's purpose is to examine and illustrate our interior worlds in any form that it takes, realistic or abstractly. Everyone has a unique language or personal culture that they may not be able to articulate except through the work of another that arouses their personal psychology and explains themselves to themselves.

Stephanie Visser

Stephanie Visser's next exhibition opens October 5, 2010.