Art Journalist Lisa Pollman recently interviewed Vrijmoet. Below are the artist’s responses. 

Please tell us more about your “Non-Ordinary Reality Painting” series. What do they tell us about the human condition?  

My mission has always been to set the stage for the audience to have an experience they might not otherwise have. They bring themselves and their past experiences with which to interpret that new circumstance. The artist Olaffur Eliasson adds, “it’s the viewers’ responsibility to have an experience.” I take pleasure in making discoveries and learning. The deepest satisfaction I receive is in sharing my work. The work I create is not a painting—it’s an experience, even when the physical form manifests as a painting.

I use the tools of classical painting to provoke emotions in my audience they might more often associate with theater. I feel that paintings can be engulfing and involving. My aim is an extremely high impact experience for the viewer. Many of the deepest and most unusual experiences of all kinds in art are only available because the artist has led you to them through emotions that are provocative but, at least at first, acceptable.

The true work of art, Kandinsky observed, “detaches itself from the artist and takes on its own life, becoming an independent being animated with spiritual breath.” In my work I do not so much accede to this as seek it. How can it be any other way? Art connects us. It tells us we’re human, we’re like each other, we feel. It’s my mission as a person and my job as an artist to bring about situations through art where this can happen. If art teaches us something about the world we live in, it’s that we must reach out to others, that to dig deeper reaps rewards, and that we share the human condition.

Read the entire article here http://theseattlevine.com/11412/artisanship/paintings-trigger-premotor-cortex/