About
Artist Statement
Color is the subject of my work, even when something else appears to be.
Working in acrylic, watercolor, and fused wax on panel, I build pieces around the richest, most saturated version of what I see: the impossible violet inside a wildflower's shadow, the sparkling magenta refracting through a wine glass, the deep blue-green inside what might appear to be a plain brown eye. My goal is not to document a subject but to find its most luminous moment and pull it forward into the foreground, where it cannot be ignored, usually without crossing into abstraction.
Close-up compositions are central to my thinking. By eliminating huge portions of context and filling the frame with a single fragment of an object or scene, I force color to carry the image. This approach carries across subjects, from wildflowers and pollinators to architectural details, landscapes, and commissioned portraits. Wherever the work takes me, I am always looking for the color that warrants a second look.
Fused wax is where I get the loosest. The medium resists precision and rewards improvisation, and that variability opens space for isolated pops of color that feel accidental, the kind that draw the eye in and make you wonder. I find that spontaneity harder to reach in acrylic or watercolor, and I love it.
Biography
Paul Krikau is a visual artist based in rural Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin, where he works from a home studio on a property he and his wife, Dusty, have spent years restoring to native prairie and woodland.
Krikau originally attended college to study art, but ended up majoring in English and History. He still ended up taking more art classes than were strictly necessary for his degree at Central Michigan University before building a two-decade career in higher education. Returning to art has been a full-circle journey. His work spans acrylic, watercolor, and fused paraffin wax on panel, with subjects ranging from close-up views of wildflowers and pollinators to portraiture, animal subjects, and commissioned landscapes and architectural work.
He lives with his family in a century-old farmhouse adjacent to a rural cemetery, which is a setting that informs his attention to the living world just outside his door. The ongoing restoration of the land, and the pollinators and plants that have returned to it, remain a steady source of subject matter and inspiration.