Biography: Willamarie Huelskamp

To Become truly immortal a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and

common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the

realms of childhood visions and dreams.” Giorgio de Chirico

I am a visual artist working primarily in acrylic and collage on canvas. I live in

Springdale Utah, USA, on the edge of Zion National Park. In 1982 I received a BS in

Civil Engineering and went to work as a structural engineer in Fairbanks Alaska. But

working in as office didn’t suit me, so with a bicycle and tent I left for Europe, where I

was determined to give myself an art education in the great museums of Western Art. In

1987 I returned to Utah and in 19090 received a BFA in Painting and Drawing at the

University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

Virginia Woolf’s book, A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN, inspired me to purchase an art

studio. Owning the art studio forced me to work hard enough to be able to keep it. It was

a win-win arrangement. During my 36year career I have honed a painting process that I

would describe as creating chaos in color and texture. Then working to find patterns,

shapes and organization using subtractive techniques. My goal is to create harmony,

simplicity and meaning. Layering handmade Japanese paper help both to create layers of

texture and to make changes to an image.

While contemplating the mess my brain readily finds faces, flowers, human and animal

forms. The process is like a Rorschach ink blot test. I use thick black lines drawn with

crayon, charcoal or oil sticks to define and simplify the images that come to mind. Next I

look for color harmonies and work to unify and limit the color- palette while continuing

to emphasize the strong bold black lines, now with paint.

The motivation behind all of the imagery in my paintings can be distilled into a cognitive

disorder called Prosopagnosia, commonly known as Face Blindness. I have an inability to

recognize people, even the people who are around me all the time and every day. I prefer

to reframe this disability in a positive light. It is the magical ability to look at the most

commonplace objects as if I have never seen them before. And so I careen through life,

never recognizing who the people around me are. My struggles to find some sort of

recognition play out on my canvases. I simplify images and make cartoon like caricatures

of animals and people, struggling to find something recognizable and familiar and maybe

beautiful.

My motto in art and life is stay grounded, find balance and make peace with what is.

From 1990 to 2007 I taught painting for the Life Long Learning Program at the

University of Utah in Salt Lake City.