"Abstract #0205" Painting

Artist for life, Alfonz Puffler has never had another job or source of income, just decades spent expressing an inner self through the canvas. Also known as Christian, he has spent seventy years creating and selling his art, always one-on-one with the patron, no collectors nor agents. Over the decades, he sold enough to support a minimalist overhead and materials, build a sailboat from scratch, and raise a daughter.

At first, when he was a young street artist in Paris, before immigrating to the US and New Jersey, his work was impressionistic landscapes, garden and street scenes, women sitting at tables or pianos, people at cafes. At some point in the 90's, he matured into abstraction, which dovetailed better with his perspective on the absurdity of life, how it's all an illusion anyway. Representative art was tired, the future was abstraction, and this is where he stayed ever since.

Now, his collection is being offered on Saatchi, to introduce him to the world wide web and see if it's possible to make a final go of it on this virtual street.

"Sometimes when I paint, I feel like I am touching the unknown. There is something beyond the paint you are trying to reach. Sometimes you get it, sometimes you don’t. It has become more validating for me to paint in abstract as opposed to representational or figurative. The whole notion of trying to reach the unknown is abstract to start with. Just because we call it unknown doesn’t mean it exists in any final form. It is constantly changing. Different meanings at different times, depending on your state of mind. But, it does require a certain type and amount of effort to reach that state. What it is, I have no idea. The quality of that effort, how you produce or attempt the whole approach, is hard to express, as the approach itself is abstract."