(translated):http://www.harpersbazaar.cl/cultura... (articulo en español)

 

Michele Krauss  has a small, luminous studio in Queens, Long Island City. She lives in Manhattan and enjoys commuting on the subway, enjoying everything she sees and feels on her daily commute. With a friendly smile, charismatic and vibrant energy, this USA-based Chilean devotes her days to creating paintings, her modern art has been shown in important exhibitions and in various galleries around the world. "My work is influenced by the constant change of environments and scenarios. Feelings, events, travels, landscapes, people, music, architecture ... all are sources of inspiration and of ideas about the world that surrounds me; it’s a constant search for a path towards my inner self ", she expresses in her artistic statement. It couldn’t be any other way, since she has been living in diverse cities like as Milan, London, San Francisco, Miami, Madrid and Boston, while she studied architecture, art and design. Probably, this explains how this her abstract impressionist work spans the globe in private and corporate collections. Highly perceptive and unassuming, Michele enjoys showing each corner of her studio in Queens, where she currently works on a painting commissioned by a Chilean. She explains how hard it is to perform certain techniques, such as the creation of a perfect line present through most of her works. "You have to stay focused, do it in a cool moment of calm. Take the brush and go, barely touching the edge. If I make a mistake, I have to start all over. It’s done without breathing, it takes time and is exhausting, I end up busted and exhausted,” she describes. 

 

Krauss is disciplined; she develops a theme and keeps working on the series until there is nothing more to say. "Sometimes I am focused on a specific idea and then, a new one arises. It is saved in my mind, sometimes for years, until I finish with what I was doing and I perceive that it is time to take that new inspiration and bring it to fruition," she says, pointing to each work, most of them of important dimensions, protagonists of space. "All my series are closely connected, I see them as an evolution," she says. "For example, my series Hope was about defining spaces and consolidating ideas that one cannot contain, as are feelings, all that which you cannot control,” she synthesizes, while glancing at a painting called Hope on Green." Many times I digress; it is not so much the time it takes me to paint, but it takes longer to think about how to make it to a final point, which is the a painting. In the studio, for example, I play music, dance .... ".

 

Michele began painting as a child. She tells us that she was quite shy and in those days, she wouldn’t dare show what she had done. She studied design, architecture and one day decided to make a job out of her artwork. Until she was 19 years old, she had only lived in Chile, but moved away with her then-husband, began to travel the world and had three children. Finally, she settled in New York: "I love it, it is a city that is continuously vibrating. I adore its mix,” she says. In Chile she conducted a successful show in the gallery Artespacio, from which she has emotive memories. “Showing in my country was beautiful, important, but I also like to remember a show I did in Tribeca, which was like the American dream. I was walking in the street, I saw a gallery and I was interested in what they had to show. I made comments of the works and the owner asked me if I was an artist. I left my card; she came to visit my studio, and offered me a Solo Show with only a year in advance. No one understood how I got there. It was an opportunity that motivated me. " Regarding her formats, she works in large ones, always in mixed media. "I like that amplitude of space, but have also worked in miniatures" she says as she opens a drawer and shows tiny pictures. "Sometimes a small picture is an exercise for a larger format, "she explains. Krauss has shown in juried exhibits with great success. One of her last exhibitions took place in the Flynn Gallery, Greenwich, where Christie Mitchell, curator of the Whitney Museum in New York, curated her work. "Everything inspires me, even what has nothing to do with me. Music moves my soul, I use it as a tool to enter and exit a state of mind. Life is a dance,” she concludes, laughing.

 

Andree Burgat

 

Michele Krauss                                                                                     

Miguelaza@mac.com                                                              

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34-01 38th Avenue, suite 420                                               

Long Island City, NY 11101