Vita:
During her four-year training to become an art therapist, Gudrun Jürß learned the basic concepts of art therapy, the physical influences of color, composition theory, and communication through the arts. She expanded her knowledge to include prevention, application methods with clients, conflict research, art history, and cultural development. This also included intensifying her artistic abilities. Jürß’s extensive handicraft skills are the result of a variety of personal works using canvas and painting with different mineral foundations, pigment pastes based on minerals (including precious stones), soil, plant colors, binding materials such as gouache, tempera, watercolors, oil paints, wax, resin, casein, gum arabic, inks, carbon, graphites, and pastel colors on canvas, wood, and paper. Painting on metal backgrounds, iron, copper, lead, tin, and the use of flakes of gold and silver to create collages have left an important mark on her pursuits as an artist.
She finds the joy she experiences with abstract painting using natural, primarily “earthy” materials to be uplifting and motivating. It is as if it has become her signature. With many of her works, the almost meditative expression of her art sometimes reveals to the beholder a kind of sound chamber imbued with inner peace. The way colors, materials, and techniques resonate with people, and the intensity with which this process takes place and is made tangible, stand alongside the artist’s own challenges and development in art. Jürß draws her own accent in space and distance.