Sheila Hecht
E-mail: sheilaht@optonline.net

Biography:
I have always been an abstract painter – that’s how I see things. Rather than picturing things realistically, my own natural response is to convey underlying feelings associated with the object. I am inspired by images and personal experience, and want to convey and shape those through my paintings. Frequently, open gestural brushstrokes generate intensely visceral compositions. I like to express a rhythmic flow of strokes and shapes across surfaces.

For many years I taught art at the secondary level in New York City. My deep engagement in teaching studio art gave me the satisfaction of exposing students to their own sources of creativity, while the interaction with young artists and regular experimentation with materials for new projects, also enhanced my own perspective on a free approach to making form and using color. My curriculum incorporated, mirrored, and reflected the concerns of my own actively creative life, while my students’ vitality, spontaneity, humor and energy stimulated my own growth. I am a strong believer in potential, theirs and my own.

A lifelong New Yorker, I was born and raised in New York City and studied art at the undergraduate and graduate levels at Queens College. My residence and studio are in the county adjacent to NYC, Nassau.

In the past decade, I have exhibited my work with increasing frequency, in commercial galleries, group shows in museums, nonprofit spaces and juried exhibitions. Over the period, the forms of my abstractions have evolved from tighter, denser compositions to more open structures investigating different qualities of textures, looser strokes, and flatter backgrounds. Last year I had two substantial exhibitions in the lobbies of a corporate office building in Manhattan and a prestigious apartment building near the United Nations complex. In November of 2003 I presented a solo exhibition at the well-respected Noho Gallery in Chelsea.

Artists Statement
My paintings give evidence of my passionate approach to finding visual correlates to strongly felt experience. My painterly textures are intensely visceral and the compositions are dynamic. Yet I aim for a rhythmic flow, an equilibrium between tumult and composure.

The act of painting is a sensual experience for me, and often produces surfaces that prominently display the actions of my hand. Procedures with brushes and palette knives include thick and thin strokes, layering hues and scraping some away to reveal underlying color. My method includes both drawing upon spontaneous intuition and deliberate reworking. These paintings come out of sensations felt through my body. I make them in a mid-size scale commensurate with that of the scale of the human body-my own and that of a viewer encountering them. These new compositions incorporate space more distinctly as a counterpoint to my engaged gesturalism. It serves a function akin to that of rests between chords.

Beyond the painterly voluptuousness of a composition, I want my abstractions to capture a feeling. They reflect my desire to discover and communicate both visual and life experience. I strive to convey a direct and pure response in a work that is at once stimulating and contemplative.