At the most recent Plein Air Convention & Expo in Cherokee, Tennessee, I had the pleasure of meeting the impressionist artist Ulrich Gleiter. We took some time between workshop demonstrations and paint-outs to sit down for an interview about his experiences of painting in Russia, why he loves nature as a subject more than anything else, and what’s different about painting plein air in America.
Cherie Dawn Haas: You’ve said you had a “late start” compared to artists who begin when they’re very young. Tell me about your path to painting on location.
Ulrich Gleiter: I was born in Germany but when I was a child, we lived in Australia, China, Japan, in many places and sometimes just for a few weeks, sometimes for half a year. That stopped when we moved to Munich. We settled in there and I discovered museums and art books and everything on my own. I would go after school to visit the city’s museums and got more and more and more interested, and then I started painting, and it happened to be en plein air right away. Besides my beginnings outside, I was, too, avidly copying and sketching after the old masters in Munich`s museums. With my early landscapes, sometimes it’s stunning for me to see (as I was going through my stacks of old paintings recently because I was relocating) that I had painted similar compositions over again, just years later. When I was in my teens, I painted almost the same picture as in my final years at art school in St. Petersburg, and I see the same composition but improved with all the knowledge that I gained over the decade in between.
This interest for plein air was there right away, from the beginning. In Dresden, in my freshman year at art school, I already had the habit of going to paint in the vineyards and parks on the weekends. Of course, I went through the training at the Academy in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the curriculum was drawing and painting the human model all day, but going out in nature to paint … this is how it started for me and this is where I’ve returned.
The summer I finished the Academy in Saint Petersburg, I embarked on my first trip to the US for plein air art shows and was fortunate to win prizes. Later, I connected with galleries and also with PleinAir Magazine. That really got it going and then I began painting a lot in Russia and all over Europe for shows. This all stopped in February 2022, needless to say, and since then everything is a bit different. I moved to France, where I have a house and my art studio. Right now I’m also still busy; every time I go to Russia I retrieve more of my work because I still have all the paintings from my years of study; there’s still a room full of nudes and drawings. Before, I never took them with me to Europe because I was usually packing only the paintings that I needed for the next show. Back in the day, I still remember myself going on the 48-hour bus rides from Saint Petersburg to Germany: only a little luggage was allowed and the drivers hated me for holding up the bus at the borders and customs with my paintings.
How do you feel when you’re painting outdoors?
It gives me so much energy. I stand outside and no matter how tired I am, no matter if I’m waking up in the morning before dawn or painting in the freezing cold – just being in nature lets me forget all of that.
Do you have a favorite place to paint?
Well, when you come to a new location, it’s always very healthy. So I’m here in the States for a short trip for the Plein Air Convention, and I see so much of this Americana, like billboards and such. A month ago, I was painting snowy landscapes in the northern regions of Europe. Of course, it’s fascinating to paint in the snow, but then you come to America and you just feel like, wow, this is also something really fascinating.
What else is different about painting in America?
The light. Every time I see America, it’s always this. Everything’s sunny, everything is bright. You just look out of the window and basically, there’s always sun, there’s always this brightness. There’s often even a shiny, bright white car somewhere.
It must be a very different experience for painting on location here.
Yes, because when you’re painting on location, you’re painting a portrait of the scene, you’re always getting the atmosphere. And it feels different over here, so this also needs to show in one’s paintings.
What else would you like to tell us about your art?
I go to Russia now sometimes, because I lived there for so long, studied there, and it is part of my life. I painted many of my best paintings there. But things have, well, changed As much as I love it, I could never paint it the same way as before, as if nothing ever happened. Technically, that world, that atmosphere where I lived is just gone. It’s no longer there; many friends are gone. As much as it was part of my home, it’s a foreign place now, although on the surface it’s the same; you can still go to the location.
If I ever paint in Russia today, I would only want to paint nature and paint outside because it feels untouched. For me, it is this fascination, this force of nature that doesn’t lead to something over politics. It is higher than that.
More than before, I’m drawn to sunsets, to when the trees are covered in white snow … and the atmosphere, the energy you get from this, you experience stronger. It became so much more obvious to me, it`s a chance to rest from, well, man-made trouble. In that sense, I’m aware of painting nature more than ever before. It is a new access, a new level of understanding.
Do you have anything that you would like to say to other painters?
Always paint something that touches you because what you transmit when you’re painting a landscape is not the landscape itself. It’s how you feel it when you’re in it. This should be in the painting. And the landscape itself is just the medium to show what you were feeling when you were painting it.
Paint a lot by yourself and find your own voice. You find interests through painting and also through changes in life. A painting that you do now shouldn’t look like a painting you did five years ago. It should always be different because your life has changed.
On the technical side, I’m very heavily influenced by the impressionists. But always look at other art, always. The best thing you can do is to always open yourself. On the internet there are so many resources today, not just art books but also Instagram; there are so many modern painters to look at.
And always paint what you love.
Connect with the artist at ulrichgleiter.com.
