Gregory Thielker’s awe-inspiring oil paintings explores the sensation of seeing through a car windshield while driving through the rain. His paintings are so realistic that you can almost feel the wet and cold weather.
Gregory Thielker says:
Gregory Thielker says:
My most recent paintings and drawings explore the sensation of seeing from a car while driving through the rain. I am fascinated with the constantly changing, yet particular landscapes seen from the car and also the way that the water on the windshield interacts with that landscape. The water creates a shifting lens for the way we see the environment- 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 works 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. I draw upon a lineage of painters from Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter.Gregory Thielker was born in New Jersey in 1979 and he currently lives and works in Watertown, Massachusetts. He studied art history and studio art at Williams College before training in painting at Washington University in St. Louis. Moving to Boston was an important but familiar change that allowed him to refocus his interests on views the urban landscape.
The paintings themselves are compiled from hundreds of photographs taken while driving in rainstorms with the windshield wipers turned off. While these moments are commonly ignored or deemed a necessary part of reaching our desired destination, they are powerfully charged with weather, light, and color- all experienced at a great velocity. This combination of speed and subdued calm, as the world goes past, creates a kind of transcendental moment that I hope to tap into with the fluidity of the painting medium.
