To the poet Thoreau, the “world is but a canvas to our imagination.” To New Orleans artist Kris Wenschuh, the world seen through her imagination is her canvas.
Wenschuh’s paintings appear as seemingly unrelated objects floating effortlessly between the conscious and subconscious, between reality and surreal. An egg floats above a single-feathered nest, a leafless tree grows through storm clouds reaching for the light. Her oil paintings are stories of hope, personal introspection, wanderlust, and her newfound connection to the natural world, her “spiritual home.”
Her work reflects the clarity of classical realism with a modernist touch by Surrealist artist Salvador Dali. Other images feel like a walk through a landless meadow of clouds. Yet, there is an intellectual and autobiographical undertone in all her paintings.
“I like to express what I’m feeling,” says Wenschuh. “Where that leads me is often something surreal with magical realism sprinkled in. Reality for me is what we see and then there is all this stuff we feel that you can’t see.”
Wenschuh has been on a continuous journey since her early life in East Germany. Two years after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the 21-year-old bought a bus ticket for London where she lived and worked for about seven years. Then in 1998, a job transfer sent her to New York. Two years later fate smiled when a friend invited Wenschuh to visit New Orleans – that was it.
“I fell in love with this place instantly,” she says in her fading German accent. “My urge for a bohemian life kicked in instantly. I was enchanted. So, I moved to New Orleans not knowing what I would do there.”
After she arrived, Wenschuh took on a variety of home decorating jobs. When clients asked her to paint murals in their homes, she knew she needed more training. That led her to the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts on Magazine Steet where she studied under the acclaimed artist Auseklis Ozols. It was, she says, “such an important part of my life, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually.” There, she found her passion for art and her bohemian home.
That concept of home is a recurring theme. And New Orleans, she says, is the closest she has ever come to finding it. It’s a place where “you can be anything you want and you get embraced for it.”
Yet, she now realizes that home is not about location.
As she noted in a statement for her recent show at LeMieux Galleries, home – like her art – is “a state of mind” and “a sense of comfort and happiness … no matter where we are.”
