My head doesn't stop. I add up the numbers on licence plates, I run the maths on a receipt before the cashier gets there, I lie awake planning paintings I haven't started yet. The one time it goes quiet is when I'm down on the floor with my hands in wet paint. That's the real reason I paint. It's the only off-switch I've ever found.
I'm Stefanie, and I paint in Vienna. Big, textured, abstract work, earthy colours with a line of gold running through. But this isn't where I started. Before painting I built Austria's first low-carb food brand. I've never eaten sugar, so I'd spent years working out how to make the things I actually wanted without it, and at some point I figured other people might want the same. So I opened a place that did the lot low-carb: cakes without the sugar, bread and pasta without the wheat. Ten years, nine books, the TV and radio rounds, the odd stranger recognising me in the supermarket queue. It worked, which turned out to be the problem. Somewhere in there I'd stopped baking and started managing fifteen people and a pile of spreadsheets. All of the running, none of the making. When a thing stops feeding you, it doesn't matter how well it's doing on paper. Covid squeezed the supply chains, made the decision I'd been dodging for years, and I let go.
Long before I ever picked up a brush, whenever I imagined my future, I saw myself painting. Usually somewhere in Italy, at an easel, with that soft southern light. I got the painting part. The light stayed stubbornly Viennese, and the easel didn't survive contact with how I actually work. Close enough.
I started painting again in 2020, in the middle of lockdown. Then I fell hard for fluid paint, the way colour moves while it's wet, how it finds a path around whatever's in the way. Rivers stopped looking like rivers to me and started looking like pigment. It grabbed me and never quite let go.
I work on the floor, never at an easel. Fluid paint needs to lie flat, and I like being able to walk around a piece and look down into it. I'm also rather small, so a two-metre canvas and I have what you'd call a physical relationship. Mostly it looks like a wrestling match. There's video. It's not flattering.
I build the surface with structure paste, Austrian limestone and sand, and I go in with bare hands, because I have to feel it. The texture is the whole point. These are paintings you're meant to touch, not just look at. The gold sits low in the ridges, where it catches the light as you move past. And somewhere in most of them, sealed under a layer, there's a hair or two from my dog. He likes to supervise.
The work is quiet. But quiet isn't the same as empty. It carries a lot, and it asks something of whoever lives with it. It isn't made to match a couch. If you want a painting that vanishes politely into the wall, I'm honestly not your painter, and that's fine.
I sell straight to the people who end up living with the work, no gallery in between. Every piece is signed, varnished and packed by me before it leaves. New work goes to my list first, before it shows up anywhere else.
That's it. That's the whole pitch.
Stefanie