About My Painting
In 1971 I attended a technical college for art & design. In the following years, I exercised myself intensively with the free painting. Not only working the basics and developing my skilled-labour ability, but rather also increasing my understanding of the art historical connections regarding the old and contemporary painting.
Just arriving into the 1970's, a period that presented itself an outspoken abundance of directions and styles in all art branches I came to settle better into my direction after much exploration and experimentation.
I was so absorbed - as the rest of my fellow students - we were all like a sponge absorbing what emerged as new trends and directions. I found great pleasure in my studies as my fellow students and I prepared over our art - to discuss and debate the differences we observed between our paintings and other's image techniques. Often the sense of the chalkboard picture was exercised as many new developing artists moved in growing numbers into the workrooms of our new media.
Video became popular as a tool for its capabilities of new discoveries. This led me into some distraction, because it disturbed the primary painting exercises prescribed to me. Also my love for music played a major role in my life.
In the first years, my paintings were influenced by surrealism and esoteric art. Later I searched for new ways to develop and experiment structure pictures, in which I used sand and lacquer as new materials for my working process. Also my focus was less a firm picture idea, but rather a color structure emerging via stratification and overpainting. The experience resulting from that, in the contact with colors, and the expansive drive by overpainting, were at that time, for me, more important than the "finished" picture. I worked sometimes 2 years on my paintings, discovering again and again - new artistic rooms (n.b. "Like The Stars Emerged"). To understand for last of all, visions where there is nothing to be seen. But for me, this process was "always go on" and it was an enormous experience. Here things never became visible and associations were free, that occurred to me.
At the end of the '70's a "body of images" developed. Here single strokes of color striping came together to create to a totally new structure for me, whose colour determination produces a "colour of sound". A structure that was discovered, and portrayed also in the scientific gene of research astonished me very deeply. An abstract that resembles, on the other hand, an organic nature element. A emerging pressure of the 1980's belays this very clearly. This structure captivate through its simplicity, and universality in the variation. An entire cycle to the subject emerges. The "stripe - paintings" include thought such as fusing — connecting — filtering — aggregate condition — light situations. The stripe can be a chain, as well as a wave. Many of these pictures have one suggestion – a calming effect on the spectator that reaches the deeper mental plains through a certain neutrality in the artistic presentation.
This order continued, until ca. 1984, when the continuous "stripes" period developed further into spatially related pictures, in which still the strip structure is to be recognized, but objects with boundaries are introduced. Found things e.g." The Stream Stone" or things that come to fit strangely into the visual world, would be ordered as it. So happens in the painting "Yesterday Against Tomorrow". An acquaintance gave me the photo of this stone from Egypt and immediately created an identification to mean stripes, and create the picture idea.
During my travels, to the USA, the Caribbean, Iceland, Chile, also Argentina, I began to dedicate my vision more pointedly and intensively towards the landscape painting. The possibility of the painting, to combine realistic impression, and emotional view, was soon becoming my concentration I used to create my newest works. It developed from uniting my painting technique of one peculiar mixture of both, typical landscape representation, and free picturesque handwriting. Here probably I also begin to see between the lines reading even more into what justifies the painting.
The works of the 1990's differ essentially of the previous periods concerning my colour treatment. My treatment is to use the colour density, and the palette knife for producing new structures. The pictures call to other periods, and remind one yet partially of the impressionists or pointillists. But it is another time and the landscape is meant increasingly no longer as a capture of impressions, such as light and mood, but rather sooner to remind one of older evaluations in order to preserve to safeguard something from destruction. To see the basic concepts generally again, and to find new relationships. One hopes to find some equal return in that through the company of others (at least parts of this) parallels in the same load of water. I am not a pessimist, and see radiantly over many things that could be thoroughly frustrating – however, sometimes I do not understand my world at all! Also my own pictures can contain meanings at the present time I don't understand - leaving much unexplained at first glance (though meaning does arise with distance). So remains what always is so mysterious about painting for me – something of what flows in, sometimes with, and sometimes without the painter not noticeing it. Without these abberations, this world would be too calculable – and also without hope! Calculability, of all things, is not justifiable, and knowledge of such highly imagined information to one's company changes nothing. For information is only then valuable if one becomes aware, and if the truth, even heavily spoken, is to be found, it must live within the art, because a heart cannot lie. And because art, it likes being "flipped out," and the final expressions displacing our imagination's shadow, must always arise from a sincere place within the soul of the artist - otherwise it can never convince! Therefore once I sign my art - it's strokes, moods and currents, impulses and feelings, are as a proof of my sincerity and existence. It always pleases me when other humans see into my canvas's story, and take meaning, pure to them, to carry forth from my imagination into their own existence. If, from my art, any good thoughts spring to mind, it was worthwhile. Painting is, in any case, a medium of the mind's hand, ready to paint forth with much deliberation - and it has another advantage in that it reflects our time - which records a value, future generations can mark.
