Lucia Deutscher
Lucia Deutscher - a painter’s travels
The dutch artist Lucia Deutscher is an instinctive master of contemporary watercolour. She achieves strength, drama and richness of colour in a medium often associated with gentleness and soft hues.
Lucia Deutscher was born in Den Haag, The Netherlands and is an inveterate traveller. Her work has taken her across Europe, from Germany to Spain, France, Austria and Italy. As well as Turkey, Tunisia and Namibia amongst other places. The resulting works manage to convey effortlessly the particular character of each place.
After graduating from the Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam's main art school Lucia moved to the south of France with her husband where she raised their three children. Additionally to capturing the dramatic wilderness of the Pyrenees on canvas, she held various aquarelle seminars in the Provence and regularly exhibited her work.
Today, Lucia lives in Offenbach, Germany in a converted loft bursting at the seams with paintings and sketches. She also teaches aquarelle enthusiasts at the Volkshochschule as well as holding weekly art courses at the Jugendkunstschule initiating 4 to 14 year olds to theme based painting using various techniques. "While I still spend a lot of my time painting, I take great pride in teaching. Particularly working with the younger pupils fills me with joy as their enthusiasm is infectious and I am always keen to unearth the next generation of artists" she says.
Her unique style is best described as a harmonious communion with nature, displaying grandeur, great sensibility and a hint of joie de vivre. She beautifully handles the complex interplay of water-based paint and the
luminescence of the underlying paper without preliminary drawing. She usually paints on the spot, even if that means sitting in a busy street in the rain.
Lucia explains: "Once I have picked my subject I acclimatise myself, letting the surroundings -
light, noise, people, cars, even smells guide me to capture the atmosphere of the subject before I pick up my brush and draw the first stroke." Sometimes, even the most mundane details can suddenly become the main theme and carry the atmosphere which characterises her work. Lucia's work doesn't limit itself to landscapes and she applies her spontaneous technique to cityscapes, still lives and nude studies.
Lucia currently divides her time between Offenbach and Ibiza. “In the 50s the Spanish island was a place of refuge for many artists, particularly Dutch painters and poets who fled from the narrow minded postwar atmosphere in the Netherlands to find new inspiration. Today Ibiza still has beautiful, unspoilt landscapes combined with a rare luminosity which never fails to inspire me”. But the artist has further travel plans and hopes to extend her portfolio of paintings by exploring Asia in the near future. “The far east has always fascinated me so watch this space” she smiles.