Today we’d like to introduce you to Birgit Huttemann-Holz.
Hi Birgit, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers.
I grew up in Germany in the Upper Rhine valley, near Karlsruhe. My family hiked almost every weekend in the Black Forest or in the lovely vineyards and nearby castles of the Palatine Forest.
Often my mom took the guitar along and we sang traditional German folk songs and had picnics with music in the most beautiful wild places. I think this informed my love for music and nature. At 15 years old, I started to write poetry and dreamt to become a writer.
I became a physical therapist partly to be able to work part-time, to finance myself to write poetry and study literature. I played in several bands, singing, writing, and composing music. Here, I met my husband a fellow musician, whom I followed to the US, for his postdoctoral fellowship in genetics and biochemistry. We arrived with four suitcases and a traveling bed for our 5-month-old baby son amid an arctic cold in February 2000.
The sudden move to the US triggered an end to my writings. I experienced writer’s block. I couldn’t express my wit or humor with my mere school English. A universal language was needed – a visual form that moved my words beyond the limitations of translation and geography. So, I turned to painting. It wasn’t long before I had my work exhibited in 2004. In 2007, I came upon the ancient art of encaustic painting technique. Discovered by the Greeks, who painted their war vessels with beeswax mixed with red iron oxide pigments, it evolved into three-dimensional, as in sculptures, and then two-dimensional paintings.
I was fascinated by the smell of beeswax, the fiery torch which fused the layers of wax, literally I was painting with fire. Here, I found my medium. I worked for ten years exclusively in encaustic and wrote and published the first German Encaustic book – How to paint in Encaustic in 2014/15. I won many national and international awards, one of which entitled me to a month-long residency in Key West in 2017. This was a breakthrough for my practice. I shifted to encaustic monotype, a printmaking technique that I will explain in depth later.
My work became much more gestural and fluid, so I switched from the encaustic medium in painting back to oil and acrylic in order to achieve long and lyrical brushstrokes. I exhibited at The Other Art Fair in Brooklyn, NY, and Chicago, Il with great success, from 2017 to 2019. Then came Covid and I focused to evolve my work further, avoiding big fairs and exhibitions in 2020/21. In 2022, I had a solo exhibition and exhibited at an international and national art fair: Art Up Lille, Lille France, and ART San Diego, US.
I am represented in Germany, the Netherlands, and the US.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Obstacles are everywhere, so what? The most important advice I can give is: follow your dreams, work hard, have fun, humor yourself, learn something new, and repeat.
Obstacles are meant to be overcome. They inform you of your limitations, your motivation, your personal growth. To discover loss also means to appreciate the given, before you go through a new door, entering a new realm, just like the heroes in all our fairy tales and stories.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
My energetic works show a lush world, where nature is in constant celebration. The gestural abstractions reflect an intense relationship with the surrounding landscape, an intimate experience of wilderness that mirrors alluring and alarming oneself.
I employ a myriad of media, including encaustic, oil, acrylic, encaustic monotype, and even throwing and painting ceramics.
I am known for my encaustic paintings, my encaustic monotypes on paper, and abstract lyrical, gestural paintings in acrylic.
The encaustic monotype printing technique is unique and not very well known. I am painting on a hot aluminum plate with liquid beeswax and pigments. The image is transferred to handmade Japanese paper by placing the paper face down on the plate and hand-rubbing it with a Japanese burin. The loose fiber absorbs the wax and the image bleeds partially through the backside. After the paper is pulled from the plate, I wipe the plate clean, paint the next image, and print again. One monotype is made of multiple, close to 100, unique printing processes printed on both sides of the paper.
The paper gets translucent and saturated with pigmented wax. The colors are uniquely brilliant and luminous and metal pigments sit as an embellishment on top of the paper.
Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
Most people don’t know that I am a musician, too. I just released a single on all major music platforms and I am really very excited to release my first album soon.
https://artists.landr.com/055120055942
You will find my music under my synonym “brightstroke”. “brightstroke” is also the handle for my Instagram and my website. Since I painted with fire, I associated the painterly brushstroke with fire and landed on brightstroke. It also plays with the image of an epiphany. A sudden intuitive perception or insight which is the heart of creativity and progress.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.brightstroke.com
- Instagram: @brightstroke
- Other: https://artists.landr.com/055120055942
