About the Artist :: Gudrun Kiefer Tarr
Gudrun Kiefer Tarr, painter and long-time art educator, was born in Germany and studied fine art at the prestigious Kunstakademie Dusseldorf and in the United States at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where she received a University Fellowship, and at the University of Maine. In addition to heading the art department of the Bangor school system, she has served as a model art curriculum consultant to a number of school districts and was the recipient of the 1993 “Distinguished Service Award” of the Maine College of Art. Her accomplishments were recognized in feature articles in the Bangor Daily News and in an article, “A Mixture of Discipline and Freedom”, which appeared in the University of Maine Magazine.
Living on the Maine coast overlooking Penobscot Bay, and sailing the Maine waters during the summer months, Gudrun’s work reflects her ongoing fascination with the ever-changing and mysterious interaction of light, ocean, and land. On the water, the constant of a horizon in the seemingly infinite space becomes a very special visual focus, as is evident in much of her work.
This painter’s primary focus is the reinterpretation and translation of the tangible and real into something more spiritual and metaphysical, reducing subject matter to its minimum and using color as a means of setting an emotional visual stage, not telling the viewers what to see, but rather inviting them to see for themselves.