Vera Klute. An interview with the artist.
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n keeping with Coláiste Dhúlaigh’s commitment to the exposure of students to industry and artists, we took a trip to the Royal Hibernian Academy to see Futures, an exhibition of contemporary artworks, with a view to writing a report. The internet is a wonderful resource, but what do you do when it doesn’t provide any information or answers to your questions.? This was the position a lot of us found ourselves in after our visit to the RHA. It seems that a lot of the contemporary artists have a lot to teach about style etc, but have a lot to learn about managing their public profiles. After long hours of fruitless searching and researching information on the artists chosen for my task on the visit to the RHA in November 2015 I decided to take some of my own advice and go directly to the source. I sent an email to my two chosen artists and received a wonderfully helpful reply from the artist Vera Klute who offered, rather than play email ping pong, to chat over the phone and discuss any questions I may have regarding her piece “Stampede”. It turned out to be a very easygoing conversation and the artist was only too delighted and a little flattered to be asked about her work. Rather than take up too much of her time I decided to keep the call to 3 questions.
Was there any one thing or number of things that inspired the work “Stampede”.? “I am not hugely conceptual but sometimes over a period of time the same themes keep popping up. Over the last couple of years I have been doing a lot of drawings of groups and people merging together, along with busts of people merging together so I guess it came out of that.” The artist is also a lover of stone sculptures and how the stone can have a soft pliable look to it, but is actually hard. With Stampede, the paper is soft but actually has the look of the stone sculptures that remind her of some of her favorite sculptors such as Michelangelo and Bernini. Vera Klute is the 2015 winner of the Hennessey Portrait Prize and has exhibited in many galleries including the National Gallery of Ireland. Her Hennessey award winning portrait of a family friend was inspired by a sculpture of her friends family. Klute wanted to single out the mother due to her intense gaze and very beautiful features so decided to use paint to create the work.
Speaking about the work Klute says: “I really wanted to have another look at her face and explore it as a painting. While this is obviously a portrait, what interests me most about depicting people is the texture of the skin with wrinkles, veins and tonal variations. Imperfections and signs of aging show the fragility of the body and its mortality, which for me makes the portrait of an individual universally relevant.”
What tools or process did you use in the creation of this work.? “I did the 3D model in Blender which is a simple 3d modeling software that you can download for free. I did the finished project digitally on the computer and then worked backwards from that. The computer does it automated to some degree in that it can unwrap the shape, but there is a painful amount of work in defining the scenes and all of that to try iron out any mistakes, otherwise you end up having a lot of distortion. It sounds simple but you can actually have weeks and weeks of painful work. You’re then left with lots of paper layouts that have to be cut and scored and glued together. It’s like a huge puzzle. Then, I think I was left with 3-4 thousand individual triangles that would be pieced together, sometimes in groups of perhaps up to 20 pieces.”
Do you have a favorite medium you like to work with. Despite having just won the Hennessey Portrait Prize the artist is very modest about her painting skills. “I don’t think I’m much of a painter to be honest, I only ever do portraits really and I haven’t even done that many. I’m trying to do some other painting. At the moment I’m trying to do some landscape paintings. I never quite figured it out, it’s quite a different ball game. I’m quite comfortable with faces but other stuff I’m still struggling with. I like doing a bit of everything, I like to have a balance. At the moment I’m doing a lot of painting and I was also trying out some ceramics. I wouldn’t want to spend weeks and weeks doing the same thing.”
When asked if there were any internal supports in the work she replied: “No, it’s just supported by it’s self. I thought it would be freestanding and supported by it’s own feet but it does sort of crush it’s self down. It does hold it’s own shape but without the little rods outside to support it the feet couldn’t take the weight.”
Imperfections and signs of aging show the fragility of the body and its mortality, which for me makes the portrait of an individual universally relevant.