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[CURTIS STEINER] For 20 years, I owned a store.
It was called Curtis Steiner,
and before that it was called Souvenir.
I sold fine art.
Very interested in craft in the gallery.
Also jewelry, eccentric antiques.
When you go to somebody's house and you see
they have 100 things and there's one thing
you think that is the most cool little object.
What is that thing?
It's mysterious. It's neat. It's beautiful.
I love to have my store full of those things.
I feel like the pandemic was a horrible thing,
but it really was a gift in that it allowed me
and actually almost forced me to change
and to become an artist.
About a year and a half ago, I decided that
I was going to focus full time on just painting.
And so I very methodically spent each day
for many hours working on a series
of paintings, developing a series
that I really felt had all of the aspects
that were me and satisfied my need for precision
and for being challenged.
And then also,
something that I felt was a unique presentation of that.
So I started doing all these very colorful watercolors
and gouache paintings that are very precise,
amorphic, gradated, beautiful color expressions.
It's all about color and light and form and connection
and how things are magnetic and they kind of
want to pull together sometimes.
When things are out of focus,
you see in the background these beautiful forms
and shapes in a photograph. And I love that.
And that's the sort of thing I like to fixate on.
When I realized I had a show,
I started looking at frames
and considering how I wanted to present them.
And then one day I was looking at my work
and I had used
some antique velvet that I had had hoards of that
I bought years ago from a dealer.
I saw it next to my painting.
That is such a perfect marriage.
I mean that absolutely
the nap and the velvetiness marries
beautifully with the surface of particularly the gouache,
or when the watercolor gets really dense
and where it's not broken
and just just a perfect little surface.
And I really felt like I became this window,
like part and parcel of the piece.
The brain started to become like a portal into
the painting.
It took about two months
to get all the framing done in the mats done.
I'm not sure there's anything I don't like
about being a full time artist.
I love it.
I have a beautiful life.
I have a beautiful garden
that is right outside my studio door.
And the garden has
all sorts of strange plants that most people don't have.
And I'm very interested in leaves and foliage and form
and sculptural things, and not so much driven
by flowers...though I don't mind a flower or two,
but I really want it to be this lush, protective world
where you feel like you are in the womb of the forest.
The whole world just disappears.
It's only your world that you've created.
I've always been somebody that's very at ease,
being alone in silence, meditating, looking at things.
And for 20 years, I didn't get that opportunity
as much as I get now.
Right now I'm doing these relatively small watercolors.
But if somebody had a space that I was able to work with,
so site specific space that was large
and I could create something, I'd have a reason to do it
if I was hired by somebody who became a collector.
And so that's something
that's really exciting to me and what might lead
from this experience to the next experience
and the creative opportunities that it might give me.
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Catch Art Zone, Friday nights at 8
And anytime online at seattlechannel.org/artzone
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