Katie Ré Scheidt a.k.a. Kiki L’Heureux The paintings of Katie Ré Scheidt, be they nudes, landscapes, still lifes, or portraits exude a serene confidence that is expressed by an unabashed use of color and a deliberateness of gesture. Scheidt abandons herself to the fluidity of motion in the act of painting and employs brushes and palette knives loaded with paint to “play and push color,” as she describes it. This pushing and playing results in a conflation of line and color in which line is a vehicle for color and, contrarily, color is a conductor of line. Through her Matisse-like handling of color, Scheidt captures powerful emotion and subtly of mood in her nudes, landscapes and still-life. Employing a fanciful palette Scheidt depicts a blue and yellow forest that evokes the coolness of a winterscape, while in another landscape, pink and yellow trees recall the soft warmth of spring. Remarkably, Scheidt often bases her work on black & white photos that she has taken and wholly imagines color as she paints. In her landscapes, Scheidt employs a broad brushstroke in a cross-hatch technique that suggest the limitless dimensions of atmosphere and its effects. Just as one loses oneself in the endless permutations of nature, Scheidt loses herself so that her work, drawing, and painting become one. The experience of getting lost in her art is something Scheidt vividly remembers from her childhood. In fact it is how she adopted her “nom de brush,” so to speak, Kiki L’Heureux. Even as a young child Scheidt was aware of her inner artist, her creative alter ego that she named Kiki L’Heureux and has became the way she signed her work ever since. L’Heureux, her grandmother’s name, means “the happy one,” and represents the joyful abandonment she feels while painting and the power of the artistic experience. As a mature artist Scheidt attributes her unrestrained style to the classical training she received in Florence, Italy at the Studio Cecil Graves. This foundation, she believes, gave her the confidence to “lose her orderly self” as she says. Her canvases are unrestrained, but not reckless. The rich impasto saturated with color is her way of exploring beauty. The juxtapositions in her compositions vibrate to create color on color effects, not unlike the resonance of a Rothko canvas, an artist whom she admires greatly. Although her alter ego, Kiki, has always been a part of her, it took awhile for Scheidt to give herself over entirely to the right side of her brain. After college, she took a more practical approach and was an equity trader working in the World Trade Center for more than a dozen years, keeping Kiki alive nights and weekends at the School of Visual Arts. After 9/11, marriage and two children, Scheidt decided to leave Wall Street behind and let Kiki L’Heureux fully flourish. Her train commute has been replaced by the walk from the back door of her Connecticut home to her studio, “The Fauve Barn,” originally the studio of the artist and children’s book illustrator, Leonard Weisgard. It is fitting that the barn is named for the Fauves – meaning “wild beasts,” a group of early twentieth-century artists including Henri Matisse and André Derain who placed color and painterly qualities above representation. Artist’s Statement I like to play, and push color. My process of exploring something I find beautiful abandons fear of doing its beauty justice- perhaps I know I cannot, instead daring to use bold color to depict light and space, not knowing what the result will be necessarily, but keeping close to my vest the emotion I feel about what I see. The surprise of allowing myself to play and lose my orderly self in the process of painting makes me feel more connected to the beauty. The conscious choice to render a wonderful fleeting breath- the nuance of a child’s wobbly run or the way the light glows when it hits the snow just before the sun sets in the cold- in a breathless way, drenched in color. It is that juxtaposition of the fragile moment depicted in a deliberately vivid way that encapsulates that moment in time, while somehow extending it.