Nestled in the idyllic town of Manitou Springs, artists Tina and Ken Riesterer have been creating remarkable ceramics and for over four decades. Their creative partnership began in Chicago, where they both studied drawing and painting at the American Academy of Art. Their shared passion for art led them to marry in 1984 and head west.
Tina and Ken combine their technical mastery with deep emotional resonance. While their collaborative pieces are beloved by collectors for their beauty and craftsmanship, it's Tina's figurative painting on ceramic that draws particular attention, for its elegance, intimacy, and powerful connection to modernist traditions in visual art.
Tina's work stands apart because her figures carry a psychological depth and aesthetic language reminscent of early 20th-century modernist masters. Her work seems to nod to the bold color, emotional abstraction, and symbolic resonance seen in the work of The Fauvists, German Expressionists, and Picasso's various periods.
Led by artists like Henri Matisse and Andre Derain, Fauvists used intense, non-naturalistic color and simplified form to express feeling over realism. Tina's figures, while more subdued in palette, channel a similar emotional clarity. Like the Fauves, she strips away unnecessary detail to leave behind pure gesture and mood.
Her figures often appear floating in space, sometimes surrounded by abstracted flora or minimal backgrounds, echoing the Fauvist interest in flattened depth and expressive design, though her tone is more introspective than explosive. While the Fauves sought intensity, Tina seeks stillness, yet both rely on the power of simplicity to convey depth.
Tina's style most closely reminds us of Henri Matisse, especially his later work, with his simplified flowing lines, cutouts and the beauty of ordinary life rendered with quiet grace, mirrors Tina's interest in quiet emotion and relational nuance. There is a shared poetic sensitivity, a love of line and figure that invites the viewer into the calm.
Tina's work also bears a conceptual kinship with the Der Blaue Reiter group, which included artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. This expressionist collective was concerned not just with aesthetics, but the inner life of the subject and the spiritual resonance of art.
Tina's figures, often solitary, contemplative, or in quiet communion, seem to exist in metaphysical spaces. Like Marc's symbolic animals or Kandinsky's abstract compositions, her figures evoke more than they illustrate. They aren't portraits; they are archetypes of human experience, painted with subtle finesse on forms shaped by her partner Ken.
While Tina's work doesn't mimic Picasso stylistically, there is a conceptual thread connecting them: the fusion of classical figure drawing with abstraction and modernist experimentation. Picasso often played with line and form to represent the emotional truth of a subject over its literal appearance.
In Tina's ceramic figures, we that same willingness to let the medium speak emotionally, to use distortion, abstraction, or minimalism not as gimmicks but as paths to truth. Like Picasso, she moves freely between naturalism and suggestion, particularly in her elongated limbs, flattened perspectives, and dreamlike poses.
Though echoes of these modernist movements are present, Tina's voice is unmistakably her own. Her figures don't shout; they whisper, inviting quiet reflection. Her ceramics are not only beautiful but deeply felt, rooted in both personal narrative and universal emotion.
Where the Fauvists brought fire, Der Blaue Reiter sought transcendence, and Matisse gave us lyrical line, Tina offers soulful, contemplative intimacy, wrapped around hand-thrown ceramic forms. The result is a body of work that bridges the fine art tradition and the tactile, human-centered world of pottery, continuing a lineage of artists who see the figure not just as a form, but as a feeling.
You can view more of Tina and Ken's ceramics at our next show and meet them in person, on April 25th, from 6-9 PM. We hope to see you here! -HC