Colleen Kassner

Artist Biography and Statement:

Colleen Kassner is a fine art painter living in Milwaukee. Her work varies from the whimsical to the traditional.

Although she always appreciated visual arts, she developed her creative talents as a poet in the mid-1990s. During this time she experienced several years of mental illness and abandoned all artistic pursuits. It took an epiphany to push her into the visual arts. She rekindled her love of painting and proceeded to pursue this passion with vigor.

Colleen began painting in acrylics in 2002 and transferred to oils in 2007. Since then she has researched the medium extensively. She now makes her own paint and uses the same varnishes and mediums used by the old masters.

The art of Old Masters is timeless. The art itself, for use of color and form, but also for the glimpse it gives one into lives of the era. The permanence of the work goes beyond photography and creates an image etched in humankind’s history. This fascination with time and place inspires my current explorations.

Goldmann’s Department Store was located on Mitchel Street in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The store dates back into the 1930’s and remained a family business until its closure in 2004. It was a popular place full of oddities and hard to find items. It also had an old fashioned lunch counter that collected a rag tag representation of Milwaukee’s “Sout’ side.” A few years ago a friend casually mentioned the original lunch counter was housed in a local warehouse. I immediately knew it had to be painted. An inquiry was made to see if I could do a shoot for my reference photos. Happily, the answer was yes. A crew of friends and family descended upon the warehouse. Although much of the original layout of the lunch counter was gone the essence remained and is captured in the painting. “Ghosts of Goldmann’s” is the springboard for my current oeuvre, “Nostalgia”.

“Nostalgia,” all created within the last year, is derived from many sources: found slides of 1955 West Bend; old photos of Bohemian Milwaukee; scenes, candid or staged with models. It involved traveling southeastern Wisconsin for locations, digging deep into an archive of old slides and photos, and being on the lookout for those places about to disappear. The preparatory process often took several months. For some compositions I made it just in time as the location is now gone.

After locale and subject was decided, multiple images and drawings were used to create a composition and ready it for the canvas. My process used multiple layers of hand-mixed oil color and old world resins to create translucency. During the final stages of painting the reference photo was set aside and recall, humor, and imagination took the lead. Whether a lunch counter, a carousel, or a smoky night-club, the goal of this oeuvre was to create an assemblage of time and place affixing it to a collective consciousness.

When we are all gone, when our children’s children are gone, we become memory. We become timeless.