Kelsa Kuchera is from Jupiter, Florida. She is self-taught and currently lives and works in New York City.
“I got my heart broken and I started to paint. Painting is a meditation, a reconnection, a way to own solitude, to choose it. I draw deeply on fragility, anticipated nostalgia, and my memories. A childhood in south Florida steeped in a blend of Catholicism and hedonism. Restraint and the gratification rewarded for it. A lie told at confession. When I remember my past the colors are both more and less saturated than in reality, the shapes more bulbous, often undefined. Fog suffuses even my most articulated, heavily-rendered pieces. They are not of this world but not far from it. I work in the way you decode a dream: image first, meaning second. I see a million things a day but some shape stands out and I am bound to its depiction. The act of painting then becomes the gnostic rite. A ritual that reveals its own motivating structures and symbols only through its performance, slowly, over much time spent within the work and within myself. Feelings and experiences that I talk and talk and talk about outside the studio are finally understood, demystified, in a realm beyond language. … I make my work for the same reason people have been making art since man first dipped his hand in paint and pressed it to the wall. It asks ‘Can you see me?’ It answers ‘I am here.’”
Her works are a part of 11th on 50th, on view in Midtown, Manhattan from December 5th —January 30th. Email info@eleventhhourart.com to inquire or shop her works below.