PAINTER, WORLD TRAVELER AND PHOTOGRAPHER

Everything in life has its time and often we arrive at turning points that demand of us perseverance and a new sense of orientation

Reorientation means looking back, reading against the grain and asking oneself if one really wants to push forward in the same rhythm and with the same goal.

In 2018 / 2019 I reached one of these turning points and began to dedicate myself to pure painting as the result of intensive experiences with nature.

This, in turn, lead to the title and the internal conception of my blog “Neues Im Sinn” [New Things In Mind], which tells of my travels and how I processed what I had seen in my studio.

My mood and my soul are full of the need to discover the world in its richness of colour and form and to find an artistic voice for my experiences.

I am increasingly drawn to those parts of the world as yet untouched by the human drive to reshape everything

I want to see them with fresh eyes and experience moments of joy and transcendence, particularly when I look at ancient landscapes.

Now that the last 30 years of voyages of discovery have taken me to every continent, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from the volcanoes of Hawaii and New Zealand to the Libyan desert and the scorching sun of the Namib, I have spent more and more of my summers in the landscapes of Iceland

Inspired by the strong contrasts I often use the perspective of a drone camera, which affords me many new views from a birds eye perspective.

In this way, the role of the golden ratio and the horizontal within conventional ways of looking at the landscape lose their importance.

Landscape seems to become two-dimensional and previously unknown artistic  arrangements of colour and form within a very much reduced spatiality and depth of field become visible.

Connections between the macrocosm and microcosm become clear. For example, the view though a microscope can be compared to that of a landscape taken from a drone.

Carried over into painting these unconventional perspectives allow an essentially freer, more playful, abstract and painterly understanding of the pictorial language associated with landscape and also an almost complete uncoupling of the picture from any unambiguous association with an object.

To find inspiration for my painting I occasionally twist the colour palette within the photographs to the point of the surreal. The resulting photos can, however, only be seen as the inspiration for my painting and they form an abstract bridge between the experience of nature and its artistic interpretation in painting.

For me, landscape painting is not about producing the precise image of a landscape  but the presentation of layers of mood, desire and dream in the guise of associations with landscape.