It’s Day 104 and it was a good day.  Today I’ve been waiting for paint to dry on my daily painting, other paintings I’m working on and also my house!  So all around, it’s been a paint oriented afternoon. 🙂  I randomly found this artist a couple weeks ago and couldn’t wait to pay tribute to her style so join me in celebrating Charline von Heyl today.

Charline von Heyl (born 1960) is a German artist best known for her abstract painting. She also works with drawing, printmaking, and collage. She lives and works in New York and Marfa, Texas, together with her husband and fellow painter Christopher Wool.

Von Heyl was born to a German lawyer and French-born psychologist in Mainz. She

grew up in Bonn and later studied with Jörg Immendorff at Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg and with Fritz Schwegler at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Immendorff later invited her to work for him as his assistant in Düsseldorf. She moved to New York in the mid-1990s.

Von Heyl is often seen as part of one of several leading female contemporary painters, a group which also includes Cecily Brown, Jacqueline Humphries, Laura Owens, Jutta Koether, Amy Sillman and Emily Sundblad.

Using a wide range of imagery, from found photographs and drawings to comic books, von Heyl alternates between collage-based works on paper and painting on canvas. To make her collages, she rips images into shapes, drops them onto pages she has photocopied, spray-painted, and marked with ink, and then manipulates them by hand. Von Heyl does not make studies for her paintings, and does not begin with a pre-conceived idea, allowing the works to be determined rather by the decisions that arise in the process of their making.

In fall 2008 her artist’s book Sabotage was published by Xn Editions and Christophe

Daviet-Thery in Paris. The book was previewed, with an introductory note by the artist, in the October 2008 Artforum.

Von Heyl maintains an expansive studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York. Both Wool and von Heyl had residencies in Marfa in 2006 and 2008, respectively, and today they share a studio building there.

Heyl was one of six finalists for the 2014 Hugo Boss Prize. In 2010, she was a recipient of the Wex Artist Residency, in association with the Wexner Center for the Arts of Columbus, Ohio.

Biography is from wikipedia.

I absolutely fell in love with Charline’s abstract style.  I love the chaotic aspect of it and I

also like that there’s a feeling of deliberation and precision there as well.  I feel like it’s a good balance.  I can relate with that.  I’m doing a series of abstract style pieces that I manipulate deliberately, but am never sure how it’s going to exactly turn out.  And I’m okay with improvising.

 I did this tribute using the process that she uses.  I did not draw anything out or plan out the steps on creating this piece.  I just let go and did one step at a time.  The fluidity was calming.  I think I’m going to try to do a large canvas in this style.  I enjoyed it thoroughly. 🙂  I hope you do too and I will see you tomorrow on Day 105!  Best, Linda