‘The question of whether one's life was thrown into the sand the moment one decided to study art.’ A conversation with Johanna Seidel

To start, could you tell us a bit about you, where you are from, where you are now and what is it that you do? Who is Johanna Seidel? 

I come from a small village in the far east of Germany, where I grew up in a house with my siblings, parents and grandparents. My childhood is embedded in the post-reunification period and many things there still seem a bit out of time. I was surrounded by forest, animals and especially older people with an agricultural background. We picked mushrooms and berries and fetched milk with a jug directly from the neighbouring farm. This background strongly influenced my sense of the existence of different realities of life and even today I feel very strongly the differences between the rural area, which for me is mainly characterised by its physical charms, and my present urban, more mechanised environment.
After finishing school, I moved to Dresden, where I first studied English and philosophy and then Fine Arts. I spent an exchange semester in Paris and finished my studies this summer in Dresden, where I still live.
My artistic practice consists mainly of painting. Primarily in small and medium formats and with oil on wood or canvas, I explore the possibilities of visual narrative.

How did your artistic journey begin? Explain the transition into becoming an artist, or what sparked your interest to pursue this full time? 

It is a little hard to grasp the moment when my natural desire to create- to draw, sing, or write- transformed into something more professional. Some of my earliest childhood memories are about the praise I received when I painted a picture, or early experiments with paper and ink in my grandparents' kitchen.

Next to everything else, painting has always formed a certain kind of basis for me and so it came very naturally that I put my focus on it. 

This happened without a conscious decision, but mainly because the directness of the medium appealed to me. I find it very practical that I am not dependent on anyone in painting. I can carry out all the steps myself, from choosing the ground and the colours to stretching the canvas. Moreover, painting takes place behind closed doors and it can be developed and discarded in peace, which suits my nature very well. I think this kind of determination marks the moment when I understood my artistic work as more than just a hobby. I see another moment of professionalisation in the moment when I had to find words for my work and gradually also became aware of a classification between other media and worlds of thought.

What are some aspects that you adore about being an artist and what are the elements that you wished you didn’t have to do? 

I love the artistic work itself - the hours of immersion in the studio until late at night. I love the moment of a new idea, when I surprise myself. The moment when a new canvas is still completely blank and the moment when there is a certain feeling that a work is finished.
Sometimes I wish art could escape classification by monetary evaluation. As Lana del Rey writes in one of her poems: ´The things that can't be bought, can't be evaluated and that makes them beyond human reach´.
Of course, I am very happy when I sell a painting and I continue to strive to make a living from my artistic work alone.
What I also like about being an artist are the many social events. The openings, the travelling to different exhibitions and the fact that someone always knows someone who has worked or exhibited at this or that thing. I really like this mixture of internationality and networking, and also that the intellectual level is quite high and current discourses in the art world are often discussed in an exciting and reflective way. Less beautiful, of course, are the existential fears and precarious living conditions shared by very many actors in the art world. In constant competition, a lot of work is done without payment and the sword of poverty hovers over everyone. The question of whether one's life was thrown into the sand the moment one decided to study art.

Johanna in her studio

Since the pandemic started many aspects of the art world shifted online, for ‘These Boots are made for walking’ you are participating in an online exhibition, how do you personally feel about showing your work in a purely digital space? 

I really enjoyed consuming art online during the pandemic myself. The fact that positions from very different parts of the world became visible so effortlessly and thus a different kind of curation could take place. I think that in this way hierarchies were dissolved to a certain extent and new, exciting contexts were created. Of course, online formats, and Instagram in particular, are more conducive to certain forms of artistic expression than others, and some subtle, physical components fall by the wayside. The attention span given to an artistic work has also shortened in comparison and one hears the accusation of a certain arbitrariness in the consumption of art. 

My own work works quite well in the online context. My painting is figurative and it is primarily about pictorial narrative and less about formal aspects, where the material, or the ductus, the application of paint, would be particularly central. Therefore, the painting can also be captured well digitally. I also have to say that the city where I studied, Dresden, is not particularly connected to an international discourse and I was able to generate a different kind of visibility for my work with online formats and the increased digital consumption of art acted as a catalyst for my work at this point in my career, directly at the end of my studies.

Unlimited Budget, unlimited time- what would you do?

For myself, I would rent flats and studios in very different places in the world, both in rural and urban areas, and enjoy the freedom to paint in the village of my childhood, to live and work in Los Angeles, Paris or London, to paint and to make contacts. 

I could also imagine establishing a cultural centre with unlimited financial and time resources that would function independently of subsidies. There would be a large garden, readings and concerts, exquisite food and drink and interdisciplinary courses where positions from philosophy, science and art would meet. But it would also be important to me to develop very low-threshold programmes where different age groups would have the time and leisure to do things like walking, collecting herbs, observing the stars and building a holistic connection to themselves and the world that surrounds them. 

You just recently completed your studies at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden. What influence did being in an academic environment have on your work?

At the beginning of my studies, the academic environment mainly gave me a kind of security that what I was doing was justified and that my painting was also interesting and readable for viewers. Before my studies, I had been very little involved with contemporary artistic discourses and so my awareness of the field in which I move has grown significantly with the time of my studies. Awareness of what references I have, even unconsciously, of what kind of art history and iconography preceded my kind of painting. I also learned that there is no 'right' and 'wrong' in art for the most part. Even though some professors proclaim a certain way of working and declare supposed no-go's, in my opinion there is only the artistic work and the way it is discussed and justified. I tried to learn as much as I could about other media, thoughts, traditions and approaches to work during my time as a student and I think that this open attitude to the art world itself will continue to influence my work in the years to come.  What I have often seen during my studies is that some works that are strong at first glance are created precisely because a certain background knowledge and sensitivity was lacking at the moment of creation, and a taboo-breaking committed in this way is interpreted in retrospect as special artistic intention. 

Without my academic background, I would certainly be rather unreflective about some of the mystifications within the art world. 

In conclusion, I could perhaps say that studying gave me the time and space to develop a way of working, but that it changed less my work itself than my knowledge of artistic work and its parameters.

Aesthetically your works are almost soaked in a dreamy wash, evoking a sense of a romanticised world. What is the world you are depicting and who are its protagonists? 

At the beginning of my artistic work was the desire to make my relationship to reality as pictorial as possible. My relationship to reality is particularly strong when I am aware of the historical growth of a place or a circumstance and thus a readability develops in which even the profane can possibly become a sign or symbol. This kind of readability is also inherent in dreams, in which symbols and actions are inscribed in a highly subjective, atmospheric and intimate space (the subconscious). Dreams seem so subjective and unique to the particular dreamer, but can be deciphered through cultural or archetypical approaches and thus speak a fundamentally human language. 

My personal sense of the world is often a romantic one. I am aware that this is sometimes associated with femininity and, as a result, devalued. But that is precisely why I want to consciously affirm this quality. So my pictorial world is, in a way, a girlish limbo in the sunset, in which various basic human narratives and characters act out their struggles and love relationships under different masks. In doing so, I try to maintain a view that has a certain affectionate humour.

Your paintings are influenced by different narratives, are there references that have an impact on the narratives you convey such as from literature, films, mythical stories or figures? 

I am particularly impressed when artists perform a fusion of dream and reality in their work and when this fusion looks like a truly original thought and is located in the here and now. Since my work is narrative, I truly enjoy literature and film as a source of inspiration. For example, Eastern European and French avant-garde films, especially 'The double life of Veronique' by Krzysztof Kieślowski, or 'Valerie and her week of wonders' by Jaromil Jireš . These films have a very strong symbolic language and are able to tell horror and wonder in an incredibly poetic way. Similarly masterful are the novels and poems of the Norwegian Tarjei Vesaas, who has brought form and content into impressive harmony, especially in the book ' The Ice Palace'.

In the visual arts, I am especially inspired by the seasons-cycle of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, by Jean Cocteau's light and elegant drawings, and by numerous contemporary women painters, such as Mary Herbert, Oda Iselin Sønderland, or Carlotta Bailly Borg.

Studio stills

One of your most recent works is a painted bed, do you see yourself combining your painting practice with more sculptural elements or what brought you to this work? 

When visiting exhibitions, I noticed that often works that speak to me particularly are multimedia. Our environment has countless qualities and I had a great desire to make a multidimensional work in which a haptic, a smell, a material, might play a role. 

I had the idea of making a bed for some time, because it refers to dreams, to intimacy, but also to life events, such as birth and death. Originally, I wanted to create a kind of setting that resembled a furnishing situation, or interior, and thus create a space that could have sprung from my painting. For this, the bed should simply remain white. After I had built it, however, it took on a life of its own, so to speak, and I had the desire to deal with it in a painterly way. During the work, exciting questions arose: What happens to painting when it is applied to a possible object of use? When is painting decoration and when is it 'full-value art'? 

 I can well imagine continuing to bring sculptural elements into my work and perhaps also continuing to work with furniture, which in a way functions as an extension of human bodies and in this way tells so much about us and provides spaces and instructions for various actions. 

There is a dialogue happening within your practise, what dialogue do you aim to engage in with your audience?

In fact, I rarely think of the audience when I work. I often get the best feedback for works that I also like very much myself and I can only paint these if I escape the mental pressure that my works ( if I am lucky ) will also be seen by an audience that I cannot choose for myself. 

But when I do think about it, I take pleasure in the thought that my paintings can sometimes seem like riddles and that the viewers can decide for themselves, how much attention they pay to a painting and thus also how much they might decipher in the end. In addition, I think that my works seem very approachable and thus also reinforce an approachable, gentle, sincere, abysmal view of the world with which the audience can, in the best case, relate. 

Recently I was asked why my work does not need to appear particularly 'cool'. It struck me that we live in a time in which categories such as 'cool' or 'uncool' have somehow already been dissolved, that we are far too clarified to buy into typical mystifications of the art world, that we know that there is a trick and that many things are illusions. That is also why my painting is consistently naïve and sensitive.

Johannas studio