All paintings: 30 X 30 cm / oil on canvas / selection
Icons of Nature
If aliens were to land here and invited me to come along with them, I would ask them whether there are apple trees on their planet as well. If not, I’d have no reason to go with them; and if they did have apple trees too, I might just as well stay here.
We arrive on Earth and shortly after we’ve become accustomed to its wonders and are busy grappling with problems and other people. We lock ourselves into more or less narrow opinions and thought patterns and forget to marvel, mostly anyway.
My work with nature is, for the greater part, pure marveling which develops from drawing.
After all, it is not about copying nature anymore in order to create a likeness; photography can do this in a perfect way. It is rather about distinguishing the inner image, about discerning those inner forces that bring forth the outer shape and appearance in that particular way and no other. This is no formal re-production, but always new. Creation is always new, even if it repeats itself endlessly. In the same way, every breath is new and fresh.
Drawing is a physical process in which all human faculties become activated. Particularly sight. The seeing changes from being a scanner that only cognizes what it “re-cognizes”, into an open exploration – into an inquiring look, into a marveling.
I’m not interested in artistically alienating the so called “objects” that lie on my studio table. Because the longer I observe them, the more alien they become. Or more precisely: they become “familiarly strange”. The seeing reaches from the surface into the depth. There, the planetary orbits are inscribed in a pine cone, and the chestnut with its spikes, its soft lining and brown shimmering body that enchants every child, holds a message. Every visible thing is the precise expression of those invisible forces that have created it. In the visible the invisible is precisely formulated.
It becomes clear as daylight: nature is a universal score and the script of an intelligence which by far transcends the human faculty of understanding and is therefore capable of inspiring it. In my artistic sittings I thus strive for harmony and alignment with the frequency of things. I listen through the familiar and seemingly known into the back-grounds of becoming and being, and paint what I perceive of it. I translate the invisible formative forces that express themselves in the visible, into the language of line, color, light and dark, and structure. In this way, the artistic process responds to the inspiring nature-subject and makes conscious what lies concealed in the obvious, in the well-known phenomena of nature.
This script is universally understood. The mystic says: “…this is the script of god.” The artist whispers: : “…wow”!
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