Johanna Seidel, born in 1993 in Germany, is a visual artist based in Dresden. Her work explores nature through a lyrical visual language, blending symbols from history, mythology, and dreams to create a unique, atmospheric world on canvas. Using a palette of violet, pink, orange, and green, Seidel crafts abstract moments that weave together memory and imagination. She earned her MFA from Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden and has exhibited in solo and group shows in the UK, France, the USA, and Germany.

How did your journey in art begin? Was there a specific moment or event that made you realize you wanted to pursue this path?

Artistic self-expression has always been something that I enjoyed and that was part of my life. In my family we often sang or drew together and, as we lived in the countryside, it was a joy to observe small changes in nature. The development of a flower, the shape of a cloud could be considered major events. The special feeling for the sensitive connections of my environment and its beauty laid the foundation for my desire for creative expression and thus my later painting. Until my early twenties I didn't know which artistic field interested me the most, but when I applied to the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden on a rather trial basis, I realized that I really liked the whole cosmos of an art school, the other students, the way of thinking and working and that I had found a good place for myself.

(Left) Crusader. Oil on canvas, 32 x 28 cm, 2024.

(Right) How to Trust in Open Waters. Oil on canvas, 165 x 125 cm, 2022.

Your work beautifully blends history, mythology, and dreams. Can you tell us about a specific dream or memory that has significantly influenced one of your paintings?

Dreams are both very personal and general, as they often consist of archetypal images. I am rarely inspired by one specific dream, but rather by these archetypal images, which have the quality of addressing something fundamentally human. I am for example inspired by dream images of water, as its power and beauty evokes emotions and responses that seem evolutionarily inscribed in us. There’s also a peculiar kind of comedy or horror that dream images sometimes have in themselves. Because they offer a visual language that can be personal and universal at the same time, they have offered me a structure for visual narration that continues to interest me and that I seek to understand and apply.

How do you define 'reality' in your work, and how do you think it differs from what we typically consider reality?

Reality as we conceive it in our day to day life follows a temporal logic in which effect follows cause. I try to suspend this kind of temporality in my painting. The canvas offers a space of simultaneity in which I build up a narrative from associative elements. Here, past, present and future can meet at eye level and talk to each other.

(Left) It's A Secret (II). Oil on canvas, 140 x 115 cm, 2023.

(Right) Lavender House. Oil on canvas, 150 x 130 cm, 2023.

How do you choose the symbols in your art? Do they hold personal significance for you, or do they evolve more spontaneously?

Iconography is an aspect of art history that I find incredibly fascinating. The way one can decipher religious images or Renaissance paintings if one understands their language is often multifaceted and enigmatic. Based on this fascination, I continuously think about which objects or moments could become symbols in my own pictorial realm. Over the last few years, I thus developed a canon of pictorial symbols that I am interested in expanding. I often use animals, such as horses or spiders, as symbols for a journey, something dreamlike, or scary, or as embodiment of a person. Plants can stand for everything that grows and spreads of its own accord, while houses are symbols for everything we call civilized and opposed to an often wild nature. I am also interested in cars and motorbikes in my paintings, which, pop-culturally charged by American road movies, stand for autonomy and freedom. Those symbols always hold a personal emotional value for me. They can come from my direct environment, from art history or popular culture.

Colors like violet, pink, orange, and green play a significant role in your palette. How do these colors influence the mood and storytelling in your work?

Just like objects, colors can also carry symbolic power. Objects in my paintings are often white if they are meant to symbolize something stereotypically good or innocent, like white horses or a white house, which might symbolize a home.

Apart from that, I am always searching to create an atmospheric painterly space, which is often immersed in the colors of a sunrise or sunset. Here, tones of orange and pink glow alongside dark greens or browns. My painting is a searching process in which I paint in many layers until I find the right balance of colors and a familiar light.

(Left) Sovereign Lands like no one's listening. Oil on canvas, 190 x 155 cm, 2024.

(Right) Starfield. Oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cm, 2024.

What is a favorite piece of yours and why? Is there a story behind it that you’d like to share?

My favorite paintings are usually the ones where I had the courage to try something new and succeeded. A painting in which I was really fully involved, where there wasn't one tired second. A recent example is the painting ‘Nightclouds’ from 2023, where I tried for the first time to prime the canvas transparently so that the natural color and light of the canvas remained very present. It shows a young woman on a motorbike in a meadow. In some places I worked with a lot of thinner so that the colors look almost like watercolors, in other places the paint is thick and impasto. The way in which the narrative and technique work together here really got me excited and it was my favorite work in my last solo exhibition with CLC Gallery Venture in Beijing.

Nightclouds. Oil on canvas, 110 x 130 cm, 2023.

Can you describe the atmosphere you aim to create and how you want viewers to feel when they engage with your work?

The atmosphere in my painting is often an evening one. There are quiet moments, filled with light and air. This atmosphere provides the ideal space for my figures to act and experience, relate to each other, and breathe. This feeling of inner expansion is something I would wish for my viewers to receive when engaging with my painting. A mixture of something that feels like a home, something that touches on memories of a physical sensation with a bit of secrecy. When I think of the ideal feeling one might have when looking at one of my paintings, I think of evening light in blades of grass, the feeling of stroking an animal and stories told behind slightly ajar doors.

Who or what are your biggest influences in art? Are there any specific artists, historical periods, or cultural elements that particularly inspire you?

At the moment there is a strong interest in the painting of young female artists and I find this environment encouraging and inspiring and the personal exchange with colleagues gives me food for thought. Apart from that, there are also many touching things in the history of art and humanity. The cave paintings of Lascaux, for example, have shown me more than almost anything else the power that the trace of a human movement can have in the form of a drawing. Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his paintings of the seasons are so documentary and at the same time seem transcendental and mysterious that they reveal what pictorial narrative, figuration and the gift of observation are capable of. I also find Hilma af Klint and Kasimir Malewich and their early abstractions fascinating. It's great to see how they found images for a new age with new ideas, how they developed a completely new language through their shapes and colors and how painterly possibilities suddenly opened up. Sometimes I would also like to be able to paint the way a poem is composed. In well composed poetry, for example in Rilke or Dylan Thomas, there are such wonderful and surprising connections that you can almost feel the described sun, the light, the air and I would like to achieve that with my painting.

(Left) Roadrunner (Love me tender). Oil on canvas, 70 x 60 cm, 2024.

(Right) Unwritten. Oil on canvas, 90 x 90 cm, 2023.

What advice would you give to aspiring artists who are just starting their journey? Is there anything you wish you had known when you began?

When one commences their artistic journey, I would advise them to follow their instincts - what brings joy and inspires, even if it might feel cheesy or a little embarrassing at first. It is also important to try and search the company of other artists and be open to discussions and critique. Embrace what feels like a mistake, engage with it, find your own language through all the things that seem imperfect. Try to experiment and work a lot and don't cage yourself into a certain style all too quickly. When it comes to commercial success, things are certainly tricky and precarious and you might not be able to buy the fancy car your friend has, who is working in IT. Since many aspects of the personal life blend into the professional work of an artist, I would also advise an early career artist to be very aware of that and try to maintain some hobbies or friendships that have nothing to do with your artistic career.

Lastly, what’s your favorite…

• IG account that you follow: @historycoolkids @mepaintsme @costarastrology

• Artist: Lenz Geerk

• Movie: Afire by Christian Petzold