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The present is a present
My dear friend and galerist Norma Osterloh made it clear to me, that this website needs to be in both German and English. Well…considering the fact that I have been thinking, eating and painting in German for over thirty years, this may take a while. So my suggestion for American and English speaking visitors of my site is: if the texts are for the most part still in German- just look at the pictures. They are the most important part anyway.
Why do I paint? I like to connect things: colors, darks and lights, atmospheres, media, voices and sounds, organics and inorganics, philosophies, tactile experiences, movements, bodies, people, coffee cups. The old-fashioned word "connecting" is more suitable here than "networking". Networking brings to mind purpose and goals. Connecting has to do with awareness. Art can only be l'art pour l'art. A rose is a rose is a rose. The minute you hook art up with a goal-with anything on the "doing" side of life-it gets lost in the shuffle. Art, as mysticism, is on the "being" side. We artists are split personalities, caught up in the permanent conflict: to sell our art but not our souls. Art has about as much in common with the stock market as good sex does with prostitution.
My life has taught me that everything is connected: Time to space to the baby crying next door and the garbage-can behind the house. Physicists know that, as do mathematicians. Obviously this knowledge is the manna artists live from. In my workshops I help people experience their connectedness. My method is to have no method, or rather, to move with the flow of awareness. Basically this means: playing and waiting. I let people experience what it is like to laugh with their knees and to cry with their ears, to see with their fingertips and to dance with their elbows. It's all about body-enrichment, which, of course, is good for the soul, too. With these basics you can go on to connect with the world around you, whether it be with your partner, your bathtub or the daily ride to work on the street-car. It may also mean tuning in to a mishandled woman in Iraq, whose picture you saw in the morning paper. Connecting is a life philosophy that includes, not excludes.
For me, painting is also connecting. I paint what I experience, and here and there this media of painting then connects with others and with the world.
Painting is non-verbal and can be best approached over other senses, that is, with connecting in mind. Painting probably has more in common with a growing plant than it does with an idea or a philosophy. To listen, to wait, to smell, to stay in the present, to pick up on the signals around me, to be open to the absurd: these are the qualities that on rare occasions allow me to span the bow and let the arrow fly gracefully as it seems fit. If I can be quiet, my paintings tell me what they need, and the next inspiration may well happen while waiting in line at the grocery store. I have learned to chill out, my ego relaying on the riverbank, while my Other paints, does the wash or has a migraine. This is old knowledge. In the East they speak of Zen, in our tradition of the Cloud of Unknowingness. L'art pour l'art. Check out Josef Beuys. He got pretty good at connecting before he died. That's why we still have so much of his energy present in the world today.
or, A rose is a rose is a rose And do I have a "life philosophy"? Sure do, and it can be summed up in two words:
"Just breathe" |