Comments about Stuecklen the Artist 

He was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1940. At the age of six he knew he’d be an artist after he fell under the spell of Durer's medieval art and manuscripts. It wasn’t until the age of 17, when he arrived in New York, that Stuecklen received the fiery baptism of contemporary American painting – first at NYU and then at the School for Visual Arts. His loft was on 12^th St. and Broadway. He discovered the Cedar Bar, listened to abstract expressionist discuss theory at “The Club” and visited the Five Spot and Jazz Gallery where he cut his teeth on the equivalent revolution in American music.

Stuecklen hung his first one man show at the New York 6 Gallery on St. Mark’s Place in 1965; four years later, he showed at the  Star Turtle Gallery on the Bowery and became one of the 10 DOWNTOWN with such talents as May Stevens and Mary Abbot.  Then in 1969 he decided to leave Manhattan and his teaching post at the School for Visual Arts to move to a mountain side in Sandgate, VT. There he built a dome designed by Buckminster Fuller facing Mt. Equinox, where he focused on his painting and illustration assignments between travels.

Over the last 30 years, Karl Stuecklen has incorporated images of his world travels in his paintings and pastels. Where ever he was, whether it was Greece, Italy, Crete, Belize, France, or Costa Rica, that special light he sees is manifested in the work.  That light is seen represented richly in the hills and valleys surrounding his home in Sandgate, where form, color and light merge. His paintings are what the critic Gerrit Henry described as “landscapes charged with the gods making love”. It is precisely that sense of divine caress that distinguishes Stuecklen’s energy and art.