Karl Bielik
I am a painter I work on canvas, linen, panels and paper. I work exclusively in oil paint on thirty or so paintings and drawings at once and these vary in scale from intimate to large. The studio is the place where practically everything happens for me occasionally diagrams from medical books or photographs I have taken may inform the work in its formative stages, but essentially my work emerges from the physical process of painting.
Loose oily wounds and thick emulsions offset light glazes and dribbles, I paint, wipe out, paint over, turn the canvasses around, print, blot, mask, pour paint, scrape and scratch. Irregular canvases, panels and paper litter my studio walls and tables. I shift from one piece to another and don’t focus on completion, just nudging a painting from one position to another.
Only when I am in the studio standing in front of the work do they being to take form, I give them room to develop meaning to be here in the world. I am in there almost every day and there is little thought process outside of the studio. The works are sometimes not touched for weeks or months, which offers an incubation time to contemplate where I want them to go, them to take me or if they become complete. In contrast to my sometime emotive imagery, banal solitary words form my titles, tempering and balancing the melancholy character of my work.
Karl Bielik lives and works in London.
His paintings have been in numerous shows at home and abroad, including The John Moores Painting Prize, The RA Summer Show, The Marmite Prize and The London Open.
He is a member of Contemporary British Painting and is the Founder and Director of Terrace Gallery in London.
Bielik also writes and performs in Lark who are signed to Standard Lamp Records.