Gerhard Richter | Inspire Me Monday

Welcome to my first weekly feature of 

Every Monday I will feature some of my favorite contemporary and all time favorite artists, as well as local, upcoming artists and fellow students who inspire me. 

The first artist who I've recently discovered and quickly become obsessed with his work is:

Gerhard Richter

He is a living contemporary artist from Dresden, Germany and his most recent approach to his work is to apply paint with giant squeegees. He paints with large quantities of oil on life sized canvas' and uses variations of colors to see how they react to each other while smearing the squeegee across the picture plane.

He is a process painter and that is what I appreciate most about his work. In many cases he doesn't have a set idea in mind and as he works on each painting he lets the image inform him of what to do next. Most often the finished work hardly turns out the way he initially imagines it to. The things that draw me to his works are the texture and the color. They are simple, yet in many instances euphoric and dreamlike.



Gerhard Richter Painting trailer from Kino Lorber on Vimeo.

You can find the full documentary here. It's very 'artsy-fartsy' and the way he speaks about his work is  abstract and 'oh so profound.' ;) I love it!

I love the way each piece turns out so uniquely. Each passage of stroke is so revealing and it's so interesting how the paint works with and against itself. This is a technique I look forward to exploring in my 4 foot by 5 foot process painting. (Stay tuned for the introduction post on that.)

I especially like his work where he paints over photographs. I love the use of mixed media and it is something I will definitely use in some of my future works.