The paintings of Katie Ré Scheidt, be they nudes, landscapes, still lifes, or portraits exude a serene confidence that is expressed by an unabashed use of color and a deliberateness of gesture. Scheidt surrenders herself to the fluidity of motion in the act of painting and employs brushes and palette knives loaded with paint to “play and push color,” as she describes it.
The experience of getting lost in her art is something Scheidt vividly remembers from her childhood. In fact it is how she adopted her “nom de brush,” so to speak, Kiki L’Heureux. Even as a young child Scheidt was aware of her inner artist, her creative alter ego that she named Kiki L’Heureux and has become the way she signed her work ever since. L’Heureux, her grandmother’s name, means “the happy one,” and represents the joyful abandonment she feels while painting and the power of the artistic experience.
As a mature artist Scheidt attributes her uninhibited style to the classical training she received in Florence, Italy at the Studio Cecil Graves. This foundation, she believes, gave her the confidence to “lose her orderly self” as she says. Her canvases are unrestrained, but not reckless. The rich impasto saturated with color is her way of exploring beauty. The juxtapositions in her compositions vibrate to create color on color effects, not unlike the resonance of a Rothko canvas, an artist whom she admires greatly.
Although her alter ego, Kiki, has always been a part of her, it took awhile for Scheidt to give herself over entirely to the right side of her brain. After college, she took a more practical approach and was an equity trader working in the World Trade Center for more than a dozen years, keeping Kiki alive nights and weekends at the School of Visual Arts. After 9/11, marriage and two children, Scheidt decided to leave Wall Street behind and let Kiki L’Heureux fully flourish. Her train commute has been replaced with the walk from the back door of her Connecticut home to her studio, dubbed “The Fauve Barn,” originally the studio of the children’s book illustrator, Leonard Weisgard. It is fitting that the barn is named for the Fauves – meaning “wild beasts,” a group of early twentieth-century artists including Henri Matisse and André Derain who placed color and painterly qualities above representation.
