Music was my first art-form. I was trained as a classical musician. I grew up in the 60's and 70's at a time when music I was exposed to was more and more experimental, in an environment steeped in the New Music scene with Happenings and the intention of transparent interiority. My non-objective work comes from learning the habit of interiority, of exposing the non-verbal. They are a mirror of my deepest conversations with myself, experimental in nature, with the intention of accepting the depths of my human experience.
Statement on GRETCHEN SEIFERT In Abstraction
I see abstraction as an opportunity to be curious and to discover. My work in photography, multimedia, painting and drawing, is representative of my need to enact that which brings feeling to life, so that I can participate with textures, free associations, and juxtapositions.
My early work in black and white photography offers an active visual relationship to the imaginal world that I see. I release the shutter when what I saw through the lens mirrored how I experience life within myself.
There is an important imaginal quality, a dreamlike exploration that occurs when I view or make abstractions. If I choose to, I experience a relational compassion for the life experience of the maker, or myself as maker. Not what is in thought, but what is embodied; felt.
Abstraction has always, for me, been a doorway into the complex of individual-ness. In the same way music asks for our non-intellectualizing feeling function to come into conscious awareness through the visceral motions of sound, visual abstraction is an inner-play of how color, texture, mark, etc., brings feeling, associations, emotion, and memories of how we relate personally to our individual unconscious.
“Ring the bell that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in.” -Leonard Cohen, Anthem, 1992
Statement on works in ART FOR ALL Seasonal Group Show
These mixed media paintings are part of a large body of work that has been influenced by my interest in healing trauma through visually representing the relationships between sensations, feelings, and memory. The juxtapositions of media, color, texture, etc. are informed by these relationships. They tell a story, my story in a given moment, through non-verbal experiences made visible on paper.
Biography
Gretchen Seifert’s artwork is in part, a view of the artist’s interest in healing trauma through visually representing the relationships between sensations, feelings, and memory. Using her training as a classical musician, Seifert is inspired by experimental music to create abstract mixed media paintings, drawings, and works on paper. As a photographer, Seifert’s journey using art as a way to interact with the world began through finding the moment to release the shutter to then show visually on paper how the artist experiences life. Gretchen Seifert has degrees from Boston University and Northwestern University in cello performance. She worked as a musician until the birth of her first child at which time she was given a camera which jump-started her love affair with visual art.Seifert then continued working as a professional photographer, and now works now primarily in mixed media.
