Q: How did you get into creating fine art again?
A: It started about 4 years ago: I visited an art gallery in Palo Alto, California with a friend of mine who was also an art collector. I was impressed with some of the paintings, so I ended up purchasing a few. My friend, who only knew of my commercial design work, asked me if I made any fine art myself. This got me to thinking... and the next step was that I started creating fine art again. There has always been a desire in me to be creative; I consider it an integral and natural aspect of being human. Creating fine art has become a way for me to express my creativity outside the constraints of producing art and design for business clients.

Q: Could you tell us more about your work?
A: I create them for the sheer joy of making them. I usually start from a photograph, or a detail of a photo, but more often from a video still. I shoot most of the photos and video that I use in my work myself. Especially a video still can yield very interesting pictures, because I can step through a reel frame by frame and find just that image that I want to start from. That’s why I think of my video camera as my sketchbook. My subject matter comes from my personal day to day experience. They’re images of my everyday life, my travels, the people I meet, when I’m driving, when I go shopping, when I'm teaching. Or I go through shoeboxes to find an old polaroid or slide to start a painting from. I don’t try to convey any special message, or teach my viewers, except hopefully let people discover something about their creative insight. Perhaps they can find a resonance with what I tried to unconsciously reveal through the painting process. The content is in the color, the composition, the image. However, not every still that I start from will make a good work of art. There’s a lot more involved, and that is the process of creating.

Q: Would you describe your process?
A: Creating art is an intuitive and iterative process where I play with the pictorial elements. While painting, I emphasize certain parts and subdue other parts. A surface is created that can catch the eye of the viewer. In fact it's more about what is not shown than what is shown, because a good art work will let the creativity of the viewer fill in the blanks and so an image can tell each viewer a different story via layers, strokes, colors, contrast, texture, composition, the cropping of the image. I think it's important for the picture to be transformed into something more than a depiction of reality. A balance or tension needs to be created between representation and abstraction. The anecdotal and literal aspects of the representation need to be transcended. To get to the final result I use a combination of analog and the most advanced digital techniques.

Q: Who are the artists whose work you like?
A: They're mostly from the US and the EU, as these areas represent my frames of reference: Robert Bechtle (US), Peter Doig (UK), Edward Hopper (US), Alex Katz (US), Odd Nerdrum (NO), Gerhard Richter (DE), Helene Schjerfbeck (FI), Robert Schwartz (US), Léon Spilliaert (BE), Wayne Thiebaud (US), Edouard Vuillard (FR), Andrew Wyeth (US).

Q: What do you mean by: "the viewer is creative"?
A: The act of seeing is a creative act. By seeing, one interprets and gives meaning. As the eyes scan the canvas, they constanty wander and focus of different parts of the image. They are discovering the surface, exploring the tactile aspects of the glazes and layers, and in general following the choreography of the image. Subconsciously, the act of seeing can also bring back experiences and emotions from the viewer's memories, much in the same way a certain smell might remind someone of a long-forgotten time or place. I recall something a friend of mine said:"Viewing art I like can let me enter the fabric of a dreamlike yet very real word, memories and emotions may follow. It's almost as if I'm looking at a film, but I (the spectator) am making my own film."

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©2006 Lode Coen