GREENVILLE — Please join the Greenville Art Guild in the Anna Bier Civic Room, Saturday March 24 from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. for a complimentary presentation on Color Theory by Louise Captein, Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing in the Department of Art at Otterbein University.
Captein is a native of The Netherlands. She earned her degree in painting and drawing from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie School of Art and Design in Amsterdam in 1991. She shows her oil paintings and paper collages in solo and group exhibitions in Ohio and throughout the country. She has won a juror recognition award for her collage work from art historian Richard Kendall in 2009. In 2006 she received an Annie’s Fund Award from the Ohio Art League for her painting A Perfect Day from New York based artist Melissa Meyer and an honorable mention for her painting Sunday Afternoon in the Park from Richard Rosenfeld, director of The Rosenfeld Gallery in Philadelphia. Her painting The Meeting Place is in the collection of the Grosse Pointe Public Library in Michigan.
Captein has taught art in the Netherlands and in the U.S. In the U.S she has taught at The Ohio State University, the Columbus College of Art and Design, Otterbein University and Columbus State Community College. She currently teaches as an Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing in the Department of Art at Otterbein University.
“My work revolves around the nuanced interplay of shapes and spaces, the subtlety and strength of colors and overall formal directness and clarity. My exploration of composition and color, which is manifest in my work, reflects the Dutch tradition in painting and design I grew up in and of which I am a part. The ways I structure the picture plane, use color and apply abstraction is influenced by my appreciation for Dutch painters like Johannes Vermeer, Piet Mondriaan Karel Appel and, among other contemporary artists, painter Han Schuil. The expressive mark making and emotive gestural qualities of Abstract Expressionist paintings of the 1950’s and 60’s New York School and early 20th century European Modernism are also sources of artistic inspiration,” she explained.
“Throughout my career I have been fascinated by the mysterious content of abstract and semi-abstract forms. This has led me to explore the multiple meanings of shapes, spaces and colors in individual collages and in series of related collages. In my process I probe the flexibility of my materials. I ‘push’ my shapes in different directions while I test and stretch the natures and notions of my abstract and semi-abstract forms.”
“As a colorist, in my paintings I passionately fine-tune color and explore and celebrate the perceptual aspects of color, color interaction and the push and pull of color fields. When it comes to color, size matters: In my large-scale paintings, color fulfills its promise. I explore how the smallest change in color alters a mood, or reduces or refutes spatial tension in a composition. My careful balancing and control of color produces the multi-dimensional, animated effect that I am after. I intentionally keep the surfaces of my canvasses smooth, without any texture – which further maximizes the strength of my colors and the precision of my forms,” she said.
