Two painters and professors at FAU downtown Fort Lauderdale, Henning Haupt and Christian Feneck, had an open studio that was a well attended and fun evening.
Haupt paints large ethereal spaces of rich greens and purples, reds and purples, each color combination also includes mostly white and some very light yellow. His ethereal paintings create an expanse of swirling space that comes into the foreground and onto the painting’s surface with wispy brush strokes. A few of the paintings have surface drips purposefully applied in a layered way that has an effect of looking into a wet glass microscopic slide although, the colors are more painterly chosen than of something one would actually find on a glass examination slide. His painting is better seen than described, however.
His studio mate, Christian Feneck, is also a painter of geometric abstractions, although the scale is his works on display tended to be 24 x 36 in. and less. His use of color, and variations of a color, are found in a multitude of vertically striped works. The paintings had more a designer feel to them, where one could easily visualize them displayed on the walls of any of the new condo developments that have recently opened in Fort Lauderdale or Miami.
I hope that we have a chance to sit and talk with more artists in the next few months although, I am well aware that many artists are reluctant.
