The Miami Art Blog by Heike Dempster

Since high school. I am 25 now and I started when I was 17. I always painted when I was a kid visiting my grandmother. She always motivated me a little bit to do something creative.

I was born in New York but I basically spent my childhood in Connecticut. I am of Norwegian and Austrian descent. I have lived here in Miami since I was 13. I like Miami and I consider it home.

A multidisciplinary painter, magnifying intimate encounters that embrace his surroundings. The course of each work is alert, exploring the territory between science, spirituality, and natural phenomena, engulfing each moment as that of accepting uncertainty.

I went to a science school. I was majoring in science at the time and then I guess I shifted gears. I had an art teacher who kind of became my mentor. He took me under his wing and got me into art and we made some collaborations. When I came to Miami and went to New World.

You are incorporating a new technique of abstract mirror imagery into your paintings

I am using that because there is a symmetry in my work and I was thinking that there is another level of unexpected value in that. I was interested in bringing that out in my floral paintings . In my paintings there are a lot of things people can imagine and there is always going to be that thing that people can dream into. It is another layer of that.

When color reacts to color in its natural flow the patterns become very natural and also part of the natural world. To me, that process is kind of exciting. I am picking the colors and I am pouring them but the reactions and the color changes are not something I could have predicted. I enjoy that kind of unpredictability. The next step is painting the flowers with a brush but sometimes I like to leave the paintings the way they are. Sometimes the raw ones are like a finished experiment. Sometimes there is no reason to challenge something.

Sometimes the top layer of paint cracks because the paint underneath has not fully dried. Sometimes the paint will crack off my paintings. I do not think that it is a problem. It is part of the life of a painting.

I am kind of process orientated . There are different processes I get intrigued by and I get really into that. Then I start considering what comes first and what comes after. When I consider before I start making the painting then I find it a lot easier to make the painting. Some paintings might sit for a long time until I come back to them. It just happens, in a way, the natural process of it. I kind of go back and forth through the figurative and abstract elements of it. I feel that there is a balance between the two. You can see some of the abstract in the figurative and some of the figurative in the abstract. I always feel like I am more happy with my abstracts in a way because they stand on their own, they don’t need any reference.

Traveling is the biggest inspiration. When you are away from your regular routine that is when you see the world differently. When I am traveling I feel like I need to get back to the studio though and then, when I am back at the studio, I wish I was still traveling.

I want to visit Norway again soon and see my grandmother, family and friends so it is important to me to get back there for a bit. Go fishing.

I am mainly in the studio really. I have a couple of commissions that I am working on and I am trying to get ready for the opening of the new Primary Projects space. I want o have work ready. I am trying to push myself further.