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Name : Regine Kafeder
Place of birth: Judenburg / Styria, Austria
Black Cat aka Didi: Tell us a little about yourself…(Do you have an occupation other than Artist? (Are you married, single, children, pets etc? All you want to tell about you…)
Regine Kafeder: Hi, my name is Regine Kafeder. I`ve got an absolute uncommon name - that’s for an artist a great plus. I’ m a visual artist and living with my 12 years old son in Vienna. I grew up in a small town in the Styria. There I learned skiing next to the cemetery and so I had early funny relations to the dark sides of life. I decided with the age of 19 years to study stage- and costume design at the Kunstuniversität of Graz. For my first exam I drew sketches for the Richard Strauss opera Salome in a Mexican style and I built a small model of a Maya temple. It’s curious that I lived many years later in Mexico. Well, but first I did my diploma in art and lived some years in Triest in Italy for working on several stage design productions. At the same time I began to paint intensely my first surrealism paintings with oil colors and had my first exhibition in Austria. After the suicide of the director of the stage design company in Triest into the studio inside all those bizarre stage design pieces less time later of my first exhibition I didn’t enter for a long time studios and started my life as freelance artist. I left Italy and lived in Mexico City and in Puerto Escondido in Oaxaca in the surrounding of great and interesting artists. The magic energies there were out of this world. After wonderful experiences with amazing people on magical places I returned to Austria. My little sunshine was born and we resided in Vienna.
B.C.: Which is your artistic background?
R.K.: Many members of my family are musicians. My father played 8 musical instruments, and his life was the music. My parents visited with me and my sister many countries, and always was the art present. Being a child I checked out very early that I was not a talented musician but I loved to draw. I drew and drew and drew without limits. My first sketches were my own interpretation of named fairy stories before I let my imagination run wild with own stories. I always admired the figurative art. With 12 years I had got my first portrait commission in charcoal from an Italian Signora and her little grandson. It was evident that my life would be dominated by art. I had the luck, that my parents ever supported me in it.
B.C.: What medium of art do use most often for your creations?
R.K.: Oil on canvas, sometimes mixed with acrylic. The last time I started again also to draw with ink on paper.
B.C.: What artists do you admire? Which one has had the most influence on you?
There are many artists of different eras and stiles. But I can remember well that I was as child fascinated of the Egyptian art, the Romanesque, the art of the Renaissance, Michelangelo Buonarroti and the paintings of Gottfried Helnwein, soon later followed Ernst Fuchs, and I collected books with my pocket money about Bosch, El Greco, Van Gogh, Klimt, Rosenquist. And later of course Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Not to forget the dark music, especially This mortal coil, Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the banshees, Christian Death, Sisters of merci. But all these artists are only a small part of artists I admire.
B.C.: What dark artistic passions or obsessions do you have or see in your work?
R.K.: My paintings are very colorful, but often I paint small dark details, like a beautiful butterfly eating an eye. I like to play with the dark in fantastic, esthetic and gorgeous surroundings. I often use the color red as icon for blood or I paint blood, but always in an esthetic way as an icon for sane suffering. If you understand Tarot you know that there aren’t only good or bad cards, even the 13th, 15th, 16th and 18th have its positive messages, and every suffering is also the gate to a better situation. The dark can also have positive power, it depends of the personal interpretation. And I don’t believe that it’s a must to discover the dark sides on a painting for see them, you must feel the dark. I often play with it in my paintings and I love this deception of gorgeous and the more or less hidden dark. The mainly dark in my paintings are the stories they are telling, they are lunar and solar combining in one.
B.C.: What relationship is there between the dark passions and the female icons?
R.K.: I’m able to paint an over and over bloody woman in an esthetic erotic stile, and it could mean suffering. A red flower can also be a dark female icon, as well a white flower. It always depends from the background of the story and from the perception. My dark passion is anyway based on deep sensual and magic feelings, and I paint women, flowers, fruits, animals and more as female icons like allegories for a sensual mystic dark feeling.
B.C.: You have done a series of paintings about the Empress of Austria Sisi next to Frida Kalho. Can you tell us about the meaning of this choice?
R.K.: The simplest answer could be that I lived in Mexico and now I’m living in Vienna, I know the Blue House of Frida Kahlo and the Palace of Schönbrunn of The Empress of Austria Sisi. I lived also in Triest where Sisi’s brother in law Maximilian recidided in the Castle of Miramare. He became the Imperator of Mexico, and I lived 5 minutes away from his Castle Chapultepec in Mexico City. Mexico Frida Kahlo and Sisi’s brother in law, Triest Sisi’s brother in law, Vienna Sisi, that’s great! This is one part of my choice but of course the main ideas of it are the women Frida and Sisi. They lived in different eras and theirs political attitudes were based on totally conflictive opinions. However they had many things in common. Frida felt closed in her broken body, Sisi felt closed in her role as empress. Both of them suffered by reason of the adulteries of their husbands, Frida’s and Sisi’s life were affected by diseases, drugs and solitude. But there were also beautiful in common of them, both were artists with free – spirited minds, they were modern and amazing women with unconventionally livings. And even their wonderful hair and their names Frida and Sisi fit in. I tell in my Frida and Sisi paintings fictitious stories and adventures of them, usually in gorgeous surroundings.
B.C.: What is your personal favorite creation? Why?
R.K.: I’ve created paintings which never I wish to sell. It’s not only the result important for me, it’s the complete way from the beginning till the last moments of the act of painting. The results depend on the feelings, the vibes, the ideas and inputs, the places and surroundings, indifferent if happy feelings or melancholic feelings. So my personal favorite creation is for me a painting of me that let me feel magic vibes.
B.C.: Do you hope your art sends the viewer a message? What do you hope people take away after viewing your art?
R.K.: My message is that the light and dark are living an alliance, here is no dark without light, here is no light without dark. But last not least I think that everybody must find out his own message, a painting is like a mirror.
B.C.: Where will we see your art in the future?
R.K.: Since last Saturday is my newest Frida and Sisi painting to see in the Phantasten Museum Shop in the Palais Palffy in Vienna. In the Phantasten Museum is also planned for this year a group exhibition with great artists and I feel very honored to be part of this event. And soon you can see my painting “Styrian Voodoo - the Alps rock” in a shop with unusually crazy Austrian folk dirndln in Vienna. I’m also working on a conceptual design for a glass sculpture for the Berengo Fine Art Studios in Venice for a group exhibition in Mexico. Well, and always you can visit my internet pages.
B.C.: Thanks Regine for your time and your attention…and keep on art!
Weblinks
http://www.reginekafeder.info/
https://www.facebook.com/Regine.Kafeder
xLegion gallery: Regine Kafeder
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