A museums lady asked for some leftovers or relics of ‚ 68. Sure these were the most ecciting times in my life. But relics? More or less gone. I checked my portfolios with works   on paper. The only one dated 1968 is a harmless design on a  cake paper.  Nice, but it doesn’t stand for our  vibrations in a  historical thrill. It is only a weak reflex of the art-revolution of this year. I experimented with scrap metal, glass fibre and styrofoam. None of the results has overcome. Most of my designs of the early seventies refer to social political criticism, but in an incredible naive way. Hard to  believe particularly because I studied some political science before. The only acceptable from this ‚political‘ works is a pencil drawing dated 1972. In the larger part it refers probably to the all over present vietnam war. In the upper central part you can seee a cut out of Albrecht Dürer’s „Coronation of Mary“. Maybe this seems odd to you. But it is a true document of the view a young art teacher, art historian and artist had of a terribly torn world.

 

2015 I painted in 2-3 days a series of four pictures with acrylic paint on canvas; three of them 70×50 cm, one 60x50cm (with the black figures at the left). My wife hang three of them in our livingroom, the fourth with its wild darkgreen brushstrokes on ochre and crimson didn’t pass the jury.Immediately after finishing the series the one with the big rose-pink cube („chicu’s house“) was my favorite. When hanging on the wall,visitors and friends favoured the one  with the stairs and the door in the center. With some imagination you can see at the left in the gray, red and rose dots a big wisteria ( glycine). This was the last of the series and it seemed to me rough and not really finished. Now as time goes by I begin to like it too. And the fourth one? It is forgotten before its history could begin…

Thumb long figurines, white clay, watercolor, transparent lacquer.

Source: Play art

When I wrote ‚ Art is everywhere ‚ I focussed on our attention. I did not think about the part visual media play. This blog makes me experience my iphone camera as an extended brain function.

Example one:  watching tv I doodled on a paper strip, simply let mind and pen float. A few minutes later I decided to throw it in the waste paper bin. A second glimpse at the now already wrinkled paper made it attractive as a random product. And a final look through the iPhone camera added a completely new quality transforming it into a media object.

Example two : next day my wife pushed me to make up my wardrobe and buy a pair of pants. Strolling through the fashion shop I met those beauties without abdomen but graceful gestures. Pressing the button was like casting for a surrealistic art soap! Here they are: the models of our female beauty philosophy.

…but nice, isn’t it?

 

Everybody has experienced it. You are liberating  a just purchased  electric device from its futuristic styrofoam packing. Hey, doesn’t that look like a sofa? I wrapped a piece in a ragged colour lobe;after a few cuts in packing paper a little man came out and occupied the sofa. Some final pen strokes and he looked quite happy. Millions of these intuitive actions never became art, isn’t that a shame?

The invention of central perspective in the 15th century Italy was not only a progress in design , but also for urbanism, science, visual perception, imagination, sociology, philosophy and even church. People began to realize that the creation of god followed rules to be scientifically researched.

Leon Battista Alberti (1404- 1472)  compared pictures with windows. Whatever we view through a window seems to be well ordered. It is amazing but what the following centuries researched and discovered could not completely change our vision and imagination. Canvas and screen are still automatically imagined rectangular.

For me personally very soon the concept of a stage became predominant. In and on an imagined stage everything had to happen. That is nothing else but an extended windows concept. In the fine art school I used a carton box as stage, crumpeld waste paper for figures and designed this arrangement.

35 years later I modelled figures and furniture in white clay, coloured them and arranged them on a wooden stage. Much easier is it to cut out photos and designs and paste them on cardboard. A real challenge for our imagination is it to cut, fold a whole stage, including persons and props, from a single sheet of thin aluminium and colour it then.

The space of art

Art needs space; art is expansion; art is a space- eater; a space-filler;a space- shaper.

 

Totalitarists kill art, leaving no space for art to grow and flourish;

The individual artist limits his space as space for art, to unfold creativity and gives freedom a face.

 

 

 

 

I love chocolate and there are only few days without this sweet friend. So the day before we had invited a friend for dinner and he brought two bars of very tasty chocolate with him. In that moment I remembered an odd experience with chocolate  a couple of years ago. After almost nine years I still feel not quite well. The actual migration of scared, prosecuted, starved people may increase my doubts: was it good to perform an artwork of pure chocolate on a public place ? What had happened eight years ago? The local trade association had taken over a concept of a chocolate festival already successfully realized in some cities as Perugia and Torino. And there they had learned that public chocolate sculpturing is attractive and appreciated. Since I hang on the idea of art serving people I accepted  a corresponding proposal. A neat block of 400kg dark chocolate (60%) was donated and carried with a crane to a wooden working platform on the marketplace. Before that I had practiced cutting chocolate bars and modelling a cute little chocolate- venus. It was december and pretty chilly,so at least the chocolate didn’t melt, but chunks and shatters were flying around. Everybody was invited to pick them up and take them home. I must say that working with the chocolate  block under this circumstances was exciting. The whole thing was for the organizers a success. But not the same way for me. Even some close friends responded very reservedly. In a „green“ city I could have had expected something like this, but anyhow it was disturbing. They didn’t discuss, they seemed to be simply disgusted.Obviously I had hurt ethic principles much more than I had expected. Maybe there was also a quite different point: How can a serious artist degrade art and prostitute himself in this way!? Consequences ?   Evaluate careful before engaging in art events -even with the perspective of paddling in a chocolate-pool.

There are two major ways to deal with objects: either contemplating or acting. As an artist I suffer from a drive to move things, change their look, to copy and transform them in diffferent materials with various techniques, to deconstruct and analyze them. I remember the very first meeting of our illustration class some fifty years ago. We had to choose one of the objects being around and draw it. I didn’t really like this job. I decidet to take Photos of an antique head. I worked in black and white from any possible angle and in various lightings trying  hard to bring this white mass to life, to animate it. The word Animation from the latin ‚anima‘, soul, matches this passion perfectly, because it comes deep from my heart and soul.

Joining students drawing nudes one day, I took a handfull white clay and modelled the  young lady instead of drawing her. Later I painted the little statue with watercolour. That gave the 5-minutes study an erotic touch.

But we are not only actors and performers-we are also victims: just think about sex appeal and its animating effect!!