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 STEPHEN MUELLER FINE ART..

 

   
 

.-.INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN GREGORY MUELLER

 Q:        What is your philosophy as an artist?

 A:        I believe that experiencing art helps achieve balance and harmony. The most important thing that we can do is to surround ourselves with images and objects that provide a sense of personal fulfillment.

 Q:        Is this a learned experience or something that we inherently know?

 A:        It is part of the human psyche. We naturally seek out things that help to complete us in some way. As an artist, I am engaged in the same process. My art is an expression and reflection of the world I live in, supported and interpreted through the natural laws that control everything around us.

 Q:       Do you consider this an intersection of art and science?

 A:       One could easily it interpret it as that. We communicate through various means, visual, verbal, aural. In the past 50 years, our use of electronic media has immensely enhanced our ability to communicate. This medium employs the universal elements of frequency, wavelength, and pattern. My art is a continued exploration of the communicative process, translated into a visual depiction of frequency, wavelength, and pattern.

 Q:       So the focus of your work is to produce a sense of harmony and fulfillment in the viewer?

 A:       Ultimately, yes. My process involves me as communicator, and the viewer as the receptor or observer. I can’t predict the outcome, only provide the platform for the interaction, which is a visual reactive element.

 Q:       Sounds like we’re getting into the territory of quantum theory here.

 A:       In a way, you’re right. But I’m not interested in just producing an outcome, my work is focused on the potential therapeutic effects of art – in the conscious decision to surround ourselves with things that complete our experience as human beings and more fully integrate us into the universe.

 Q:      Clearly, your philosophy and process didn’t spring forth fully realized. How did you get here?

 A:       I have been drawing and painting since I was very young. I had an art school education, and later on, I trained and worked as a professional photographer. I learned the classical methods of creating art, of visual observance, and creating balanced composition. Gradually, I began to move away from representational work because I began to see that the recognition and categorization of visual elements was getting in the way of fully experiencing the artwork as a whole.

 Q:       Similar to the marked difference between color photography and black-and-white?

 A:       That’s a good example. A color photograph gives us the depiction of the world as we normally see it, while a black-and-white photo removes all the color cues. We are then forced to observe the structure of the image, the elements that make it what it is. The bones. And that can be a very powerful visual experience.

 Q:       And your work takes the process a step further?

A:        Exactly. I leave in the color cues, but each piece I create is a reflection of the underlying universal structure or frequency. These are essentially mathematical expressions – linear equations, if you will. Virtually all observance takes place through complex pattern recognition, and in my work I am striving to create patterns and frequencies that bring harmony, energy, calm, introspection, and above all, intellectual stimulus. Each design that I create is meant to have a certain reactive aspect that is essentially therapeutic in nature.

 Q:      Taking that a step further, do you consider yourself to be a symbolic artist?

 A:       In a certain sense, yes. My art forces the viewer to interact with it, to try to explain the strong emotional or even physical effects that it evokes. These reactions go deep, probably right down to our DNA. My symbols are various geometric patterns and frequencies that mimic visually what is happening at the system level where everything is a function of light.

 Q:       Are there artists who have influenced your work over time? Or those you particularly admire?

 A:       Henri Cartier-Bresson was an early influence on my photographic work. He is considered to be the father of photojournalism, and I learned about the power of visual narratives from studying his work. My current art owes some of its focus and direction to painters like Piet Mondrian and Frank Stella. Mondrian’s balanced compositions of primary colors are still astonishing. I find the optical art creations of Yaacov Agam very interesting, as well as the graphic works of Alexander Calder. All the artists that I mentioned have great color sense and they inspire my own explorations into the use of color to elicit positive response from the viewer.

 Q.       I think it’s clear that Mondrian was headed in essentially the same direction as your work.

A:        Piet Mondrian had a natural sense of harmonics, balance, and light waves. This is something that he arrived at by intuition because the science wasn’t available at that time to use as a correlative. Otherwise, it’s likely that he would continued until he literally created a completely new art form.

 Q:       Wasn’t he responsible for Neo-Plasticism as an art movement?

 A:       Yes, Neo-Plasticism is another term used to describe, De Stijl, or ‘The Style’, an art movement founded around 1917. De Stijl refers to work that Piet and his contemporaries did during the period of 1917-31. They sought to express a utopian ideal through their art that was focused on the concept of spiritual harmony. Their approach was to reduce complexity as a means of inducing visual balance – using white, black, and three primary colors, with the design carefully organized in horizontal and vertical arrays. I think that these explorations led them to an inadvertent discovery of harmonic balance and the therapeutic effects of color and light waves. And this is exactly where my work emanates from, except that the hard science is now available to support the theoretical ideas.

 Q:       Your work is considerably more complex, but that underlying sense of balance and harmony remains. 

A:        I feel like I keep reaching new levels, discovering new configurations. Again, this is based on a thoughtful confluence of theory and science. I’m approaching the therapeutic effects from what is effectively the sector of light wave mechanics. But my work is also a representation of physics at the quantum level. I am trying to reflect what is actually there, making the invisible visible – so it can be experienced as a positive, enriching experience that in some way ‘completes’ the viewer.   

 Q:       Does your current body of work constitute the bulk of your artistic explorations?

 A:       It is my primary focus at this point in time, but I continue to make photographs and paint. I favor a nonrepresentational, abstract expressionist style, and I’m comfortable working on large canvases where I can use broad, gestural brushstrokes and really move the paint around.

 Q:       Does planning have a large role in the development of an artwork?

 A:       As a photographer, I move through the world inundated by a seemingly endless flow of imagery begging to be cropped and composed. That means that I must continually force myself to drill down to the potentially great images and pass on all the others. My geometric work is much the same process. I constantly see many, many avenues of design, but I must choose very carefully in order to elicit that final outcome I am seeking. The world I am reflecting is that of a very complex puzzle. It’s like I’m using a Rubik’s Cube of design potentiality, turning it endlessly, carefully studying each new combination, finding a certain fault, then moving on to the next one. At some future point, I reach that place of complete balance and harmony, where line frequency and pattern melds perfectly with color tone and temperature, and that becomes the new artwork. Often, I work for several weeks on development of a single new design.

 Q:       Who is your art created for?

 A:       It is for me just as much as for those who choose to acquire it for themselves. My work is the expression and reflection of the world we live in, but taken to the elemental level. It is meant to inspire those who interact with it, and also to be therapeutic, in that it can help complete them as human beings. Art is ingrained in our DNA. Think about those prehistoric artists tens of thousands of years ago, working out a visual narrative on a cave wall. We are still engaged in that very same process comprised of communicator and observer, intertwined. One cannot truly exist without the other. Ultimately, my art is created for each of us.

 


 

 

 

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