Oriele Steiner (b. 1993, UK) | Keep You There, 2021 | Oil on canvas, 119x119

Oriele Steiner (b. 1993), a young British painter currently living and working in Brighton.

Oriele was born and raised in North London from both deaf parents, for which her first language learned was the visual one. It was only during her academic years that she understood out how this peculiarity had indeed contributed at shaping her interest in visual arts. Her father, a painter himself, died when she was seven, and soon after that event, Oriele underwent some therapeutical activity, which brought her to consider the visual arts as an essential piece of the therapeutic process itself.

Growing up, she found out with stronger awareness that painting would have soon become her main field of interest. In college, she applied for a BFA in Fine Arts Painting achieved at the Brighton Unversity in 2015 – with a prior Foundation course at Central Saint Marti. Before her academic years, Steiner didn’t consider herself a san oil painter. It was during the second BFA year that she realized how to turn this frustration into an achievement. It mainly happened while attending an art show as she chanced upon in viewing the work by former painter Richard Diebenkorn. Oriele suddenly understood how her weaknesses could be used as strengths and began exploring how to avoid including elements she felt uncomfortable within her artworks. This shift is considered by herself a turning point to her present style. Her subjects will now include blurred and evocative personal emotions. She will engage the viewer to reflect and interpret the depicted characters as a memoir from the past, a set of fuzzy feelings similar to a dream.

Oriele Steiner will explain how this achieved technique fully satisfies her need to explore her memories and personal story. Through her characters, she finds the ability to cover her missing emotional pieces like a jigsaw. This search for emotions is also significantly related to the artwork itself; it’s while painting that Oriele may better understand her primary triggers. Her new subjects all share feelings of loneliness and isolation, with a consequent analysis of human relationships.

It’s a cause of reflection on how this is a perfect fit for this challenging moment of worldwide quarantine. Oriele also had – as many of us – to change her career and life plans when this global emergency occurred. Her plans of moving to London, for which she was already packing for, suddenly vanished. Luckily her young age doesn’t cancel the idea of applying to an MFA and deepen her art skills.