BIO

Maya Tempel is a Milwaukee-based painter and designer. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Studio Arts from the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin. 

Tempel primarily oil paints expressive figurative landscapes based on candid memories. She is also skilled in designing net.art websites and kinetic typography motion graphics videos. Tempel is the recipient of numerous awards including the Elsa Ulbricht and Laurence Rathsack scholarships. Tempel has exhibited work in locally at Kenilworth Square East Gallery, the Arts Center Gallery and Union Art Gallery at UW-Milwaukee, and the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts; she has given artist talks at the latter two locations. She has also shown art at the Santa Reparata School of Art while studying abroad in Florence, Italy.

Tempel is currently based in Milwaukee, studying the process of recollection and spectacle of everyday life through painting. In the future, she plans on continuing this practice at an out-of-state residency.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work draws on my fascination with existing in a world built on the physical transcendence of abstracted, distorted, and lost consciousness. I oil paint figurative landscapes to re-inhabit personal memories as they exist within a collective, intangible consciousness of its participants. Each painting captures different moments from my personal archive that are the most honest, where the subjects are fully immersed in their environment, unaware of the moment being captured. The subjects’ candidness invites viewers to experience the moment as a participant; then they are urged to linger on the dynamic layers of loose, gestural, organic marks.

I take liberties with paint application by giving into the inherent immediacy of paint behavior. Marks are both descriptive and exploratory; I rely on personal intuition to guide the level of resolve of the forms. After layering fragments of representational information into an abstracted composition, an overarching image physically emerges from these obscured bits and pieces to recall a lived memory. 

While moments of recognition naturally reveal themselves, parts of the painting are left in a state of progressional and representational ambiguity, leaving room for personal bias to complete the memory and letting viewers fill in what’s happening in the moment. These works insist on slowing down and grasping for the essence of fleeting temporality, creating a spectacle of plain existence with bold, tactfully chaotic, and semi-surreal visual experiences.