lucent figures and gradually gain more substance as their outlines are reinforced with solid paint. Repeating this kind of figuration transposes line into mass, so circles become spheres, ellipses become ovoids, and everything builds to turbulent jumbles of colorful ribbons, streamers and balls.
This transition from chaos to clarity is the metaphor that Krause has identified as the current motivation for his art. He worries about his “abiding anal tendencies,” his passion for order and control that could have tightened his work and confined his imagination. The new work, the Chronos/Topos series, profits from Krause’s conscious choice to paint abstract ideas
“realistically,” and to let ambiguous poetic content be the subject of the work.
Developing his career in his hometown of Cincinnati has taken strategic planning. It has involved getting away to New York City, Chicago or Europe by means of sabbatical leaves and academic residencies as frequently as he can. Krause has been scrupulous about portioning time for painting from time for teaching and time for family life.
In Krause’s case, no time was ever wasted, although in this current body of work there is a palpable sense of nostalgia for frivolity and perhaps for the carefree days of a younger artist.
An associate artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Krause has been a vis-
iting artist at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, in Munich, Germany, and one of five artists in residence at the Rathausgalerie, also in Munich. He has been awarded residencies at the Cooper Union in New York, and at the Chateau, Rochefort-en-Terre, France. Krause attended the University of Cincinnati and the University of London, England, but earned his BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati and his MFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. He is chair of the Department of Fine Arts at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. His work has been included in more than 65 exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati), the Huntington Museum of Art, the Dayton Art Institute, and the Moss-Thorns Gallery of Art. His most recent solo exhibition was at the Phyllis Weston/Annie Bolling Gallery in Cincinnati.
www.artistsmagazine.com ■ November 2008
Sirens 7 (oil, 54x48)
References:
Archives