SNUGGLE UP | BETHANY KOHRT

Bethany Kohrt is a British artist currently living and working close to the Bavarian Alps in Germany. As a highly experimental and process-driven artist, Bethany explores the mark-making journey using a wealth of different materials and surfaces. Her original mixed media works each carry a rich and layered history as Bethany repurposes and recycles previous works whilst contrasting materials and mark-making styles. The process is organic and considered as she responds to each piece intuitively, adding and subtracting until the final composition emerges.

We love how Bethany responds to the natural environment that surrounds her in Bavaria and how her work has naturally adapted to the new reality of 2020 – bringing forth a burst of creative energy as she blurs the line between representation and abstraction. We have a great selection of Bethany’s mixed media vessel paintings available now at Artsnug!

Tell us about your studio practice. How do you create your artworks?

I am fortunate to be living out in the country in Bavaria in southern Germany where space is in abundance. My studio is huge and I am very lucky to be able to really spread my wings and make as much mess and work as I want! I also approach my working life in a way that rather flies in the face of the more traditional, tormented artist cliché: I treat my art practice as a day job and I go in every morning at 8am with a large coffee in hand and I work until I pick up my children, with one hour for lunch. I do this Monday to Friday almost without exception and I often work weekends too. I believe that honing a craft takes commitment and practice. I don’t believe in talent, or at least, talent is rarely the whole story.

I work on a lot of paintings at once. I work fairly intensively and I create large amounts of work, which may then be recycled or repurposed later. I always prefer too much to too little. I experiment a lot and directly onto the substrate, taking the idea from one surface to the next to the next. I work on canvas, wood, cardboard, paper and fabric and I use paint, ink, charcoal, oil pastels and lots of collage elements, even on the large canvases.

How has lockdown been for you artistically speaking?

The vessel paintings came about during the lockdown as the way I approached painting changed suddenly and dramatically. Instead of working in my studio with the landscape as my inspiration, I was working at home, in closed quarters, with my immediate surroundings for inspiration. The scale shifted to small, contained objects that felt a symbolic reflection of my own containment. I created these still life paintings with materials available, often recycling older drawings and paintings, as well as collaging fabric and paper collected over many years and from places all over the world. In this way, the vessels became autobiographical with the subject of the paintings becoming contained memories of past landscapes.

I know for many artists lockdown was not an enjoyable experience with no access to a working space or much anticipated exhibitions and shows being cancelled, and whilst those things affected me too, it also unleashed a surge in creativity in me. With the world seeming to turn upside down overnight, for me it led to new ideas, new ways of working and thinking and a questioning of what I want and expect from my work.

Which art movements, artists or art works have influenced you?

My first degree was in Art History so I had a broad basis for looking at artists of the past and thinking about art in a philosophical context. Over the years since then, I became aware that I was inspired by all sorts of visual ideas, not just the fine arts. There were times I was more interested in architectural design and jewellery design than in paintings. When I returned to painting after a long time away, I realised how inspired I was by all sorts of aesthetics: the Japanese textiles and Chinese porcelain that our home was full of growing up in Hong Kong, gemstones and precious metals (I even studied to become a Gemologist!), furniture design and the textile arts.

In terms of Fine Art, the period of art history most relevant for me would have to be the first and second generations of Abstract Expressionist painters, particularly the works of Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Wilhem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and probably most of all, Richard Diebenkorn.

More historically I spend much time with books and images of Bonnard, Vuilliers and the other “Les Nabis” for their rich use of colour and pattern.

The present-day artists who really help to inform the way I work include Anne-Sophie Tschiegg, Gary Komarin, Sam Lock, David Mankin, Deborah Tarr, Lola Donoghue, Alice Neave, Uzo Hiramatsu, Jean-Baptiste Becancon, Rob Szot and Alice Sheridan among many, many others! I am drawn to painters primarily, and within painting I am interested in expansive space, texture, interesting mark making and expert use of colour. I love newness in art, I love that an age old technique of painting can be made new and express ideas of the present.

There’s a zombie apocalypse! You can only take one piece of art to the bunker, but it can be anything in the world. What do you take?

Diebenkorn’s ‘Day at the Race’, 1953.

If you could choose 3 pieces of Artsnug artwork to ‘snuggle up’ with, which would they be?

Without even having to think about it, definitely Jonathan Lawes’ prints would be top of my list! I love the ‘Bijou’ series with their signature graphic blocks but more transparent, a little more ambiguous and softer.

After that I would choose Alice Serifino’s ‘Naturalia Tavola II’, which is just so beautiful and we share a love of blue and white! And of course, a love of nature.

Last but not least would be Clare Halifax’s ‘Fish n’ Waterlily’, which I simply love. The colours remind me of Paul Serusier’s ‘Femmes a la Source’, with the rich teal and bright orange. Beautiful!