The artists fingerprint

Southern landscape, acrylic paint on canvas

Sitting on the steps of the staircase in our home drinking a cup of tea I watch a landscape painted a couple of years ago. And I can ‚read‘ the concept of my way of painting :

lines separated from colors /  colors approximately taken from nature/ colors anchored on lines / lines and colors interact in a rhythm close to motifs/ interaction reaches from handwriting type of drawing to dots of color/ composition following more or less the renaissance concept of a window (Leon Battista Alberti,1404-72)/ always a battle of spreading and centering/ there is also the opposition of yin and yang, male and female, swaying colors and crossing, penetrating lines/ rising upon  a musical structure ,abstract even when following the natural look of persons , beasts, plants , scenes, actions/ this invisible structure gives hold to all my artefacts, whether they stand still or move, have two or more dimensions.

This structure is individual me -and -you, personal and unmistakable like a FINGERPRINT.

30) Variations are vitamins for art

Producing series, vary subjects, invent new solutions and ask new questions are essential motors of art. This is not to misunderstand as image neurosis of single artists or artist pretenders. It is much more. I realized that the last days, when I decided to continue working with an iPhone screen-drawing ( post „As time goes by“, Febr. 9, 2017) using now a black acrylic marker ( molotow).

When you decide to do that you open the safe of art history and humanities and start to enjoy it! There is Claude Monet with the cathedral paintings; studies of facial expressions  by Caracci, Rembrandt, Mesmer ; there are Mondrians and Picassos reductions of naturalistic images ( apple tree, bull) into minimal lines. You may also look at product design like cars ( real campaigns) or commercials for cigarettes without naming product or brand. Enjoy it!

By the way, some of those inkjet and acrylic drawings will be shown in the gallery of the Künstlerbund Tübingen from 04.03.2017 to 08.04.2017 („Grafik III“).

29) ‚When I am eightyfour..‘

In times when I carve wood day after day, I feel guilty for neglecting drawing and painting. Then  I have to do some paper work. I cut in a small sheet of white paper in a way that nothing gets lost. A technique, I am familiar with from metal cutting. Next I paint thick black lines supporting the rhythm of the paper relief. Then I add yellow, orange, light blue and red to make it more lively. Some corrections of the black lines follow and are as important as are the dots of dark blue and gray. Finally I watch rhythm amd ‚animation ‚ of the little tableau. Important for me is the imagination of a story or stage play. Guess that this is something what we can still do ‚when we are 84‘.

From a distance

It happened yesterday that I looked from outside through a window in my studio. The two small watercolors on the table seemed to be strange and familiar together. I had painted them in the evenings after working at the mahogany sculpture. I remember that the green-grey portrait was done first and worked over and over again- without becoming better. The second picture with the bright colors was designed the other day and finished in one turn. No doubt my inside ’stranger‘ liked it much more. The cruel fact is that from a distance and at first glance the bright picture appears more attractive. Can we say that  nobody cares for ones chores, troubles ,dark sides?

Full moon

Saturday night was full moon. My wife shouted : “ Come and see!“ Ok! Ok! But the moment I saw the moon in fight with clouds passing the steeple of the nearby church, I was caught by this ‚motif‘. And of course does it make sense: I am not a farmer who is familiar with the importance of the moon periods for seeds and plants. And I know little about the goddess moon and her mythical, healing, haunting,or magic power. What I remember is a child staring at this shining plate and trying to figure out how the face of the man up there looks like. And what I know for sure is that the full moon was and is still a very romantic motif in painting, illustration and poetry in Europe. And I remember C.D. Friedrich, Spitzweg, Goethe, Blake, E.T. A. Hoffmann… It is hard not to see what you have been taught, isn’t it?

28) „As time goes by“

Designed with fingertips on an iPhone. The monotone picks give a sensation of passing time

Time is an issue that occupies my artistic imagination again and again. Not so much the traditional allegories of time, as what happens in modern art. The artists of the italian futurism invented a new design for ’speed ‚. It were the surrealists (Dali, Ernst, Magritte) who employed new dimensions of time for their art. Philosophy, psychology and language gained a before unknown importance for the visual art. Yesterday I had the chance to see a show at the Stuttgart art museum titled „(Un)erwartet-Die Kunst des Zufalls.“ A great concept, a great show- to say it in Trump speech. The blend of mathematical processes, cybernetics, aesthetics and play opens the view on new sensual  time perceptions. For a moment I realized how much a blog and its single posts can themselves be elements of aleatoric processes.

27) Now I definitely feel much better!

  1. In a former post („Beware of similarities!“) I had discussed a conflict of modern art. Our appreciation of a work is not based on natural similarities but on how it is done. I realize this physically when sculpturing. If there is once a similarity noticed by myself or somebody else it is like fighting an enemy.
  2. In this special case of a hard to handle mahogany block the significant grain played an important role. And here waits another trap: the grain should not be master of a wooden piece. Maybe that everybody will like it, but soon  you will realize that art slipped away.