About my painting

I love looking at people and everything that surrounds me, from tiny things fallen into dust to the movement of the planets and the stars. However, I am just as curious about the things inside, as about the things outside.
Beauty, delicacy, luminosity, nature inspire me. Yet I am also drawn to the mundane, the quirkiness, the irony, the humour, the warped looking-glass. I am not so interested in a critical edge, just a love-filled awe of our world.

I am drawn to depicting those things which our everyday minds and eyes don’t see. I feel lured to the mythological world, the land of fairy-tales. When I enter this world I feel as if I am tapping into a deep, primal, collective, human consciousness, as well as the depth of my own soul. I am absorbed with symbols.

My subjects vary, but I mainly focus on people. A meditative style is dominant, people immersed in different activities, present in the moment. In some periods, my work was concerned with how people interact, how they connect, how they can or cannot step out of their individual contemplation and find their way to each other.

These days mostly female figures appear in my paintings, either from a personal perspective: these figures condense the working of my inner processes into an image, or from a more general perspective, when I follow the footsteps of the Great Mother, invoking Goddesses of different times and cultures. I’m interested in how female qualities (which we can also understand as psychological forces) come together in a symbolic picture.
My ideas are best conveyed with the tools of classical painting. My technique carries the imprint of several great masters, the Renaissance era and the Far East. I believe that traditional painting has its validity in modern art.

In my recent paintings I experiment with the use of embroidery. Embroidery does not interest me for its decorative appeal but for the needle piercing through the flat plane of the painting and thereby creating a new space, new dimension. The embroidery is therefore more than a decoration, it opens a new layer. Embroidery becomes a magic act. At the same time I am drawn to the female world of embroidery. The time-consuming, monotonous act of stitching creates an intimate, meditative space that I gladly immerse myself in.

My paintings tell stories about my relationship with myself, the world; I paint using my intuition and the knowledge gained throughout the years, influenced by all the things that happen to me.

Marta Kiss

2017