Gregory Thielker

Hey, do you like taking photos through rainy windows? Me too.
But wait… these aren’t photos – they’re oil paintings.

Okay, paintings of photos, but still: mind=blown.

These paintings are part of an ongoing series, “Under the Unminding Sky” by Gregory Thielker, a US artist / art instructor / lecturer/ world traveller / raconteur. All are oil on linen, and are mostly 3×4′. There’s something reminiscent of Gerhard Richter about them in a strictly visual sense, but the American obsession with automobile culture & the open road seems to be more of an underpinning theme than anything Richter covers. Not that I’m complaining, this series resonates with me a lot – and not just because I like to take pictures through rainy windows.

These paintings reflect my interest in the way that the road delineates and controls how we experience landscape. From the roadway perspective, we not only travel from one place to another, we see landscape in a varied and complex manner. I use water on the windshield to create a shifting lens for the way we see the environment: it both highlights and obscures our viewing. Perspectives slip and compress, while shapes and colors merge into one another. I also work with relationships between surface and depth, between flatness and illusion. These images are born out of real experience and have a close relationship with the medium of painting: its fluidity, transparency, and capacity for layering, mixing, and blending.

– from gregorythielker.com