Biography · Reflections

Beets and Haulm, 2008 · Detail

Biography

Reflections

At the age of 3, I started to paint, as does every child. My summer vacations I used to spend at my grandparents house near Dresden. They encouraged my interest in painting by taking me to see the Dresden Art Galleries even though they themselves never visited the exhibitions. Often, I spent whole days in the galleries in front of my favourite paintings.

When I was young, I copied the paintings of the Old Masters so as to understand more deeply their feelings when painting the pictures centuries earlier. Later, I painted in a more abstract way, because I found the precise details disturbing. For many years now, I have no longer been satisfied with flat and diffuse shapes in my pictures. With the Old Masters I am united in their addiction to beauty and perfection and their curiosity in the dark spots in our souls.

Now, I am a painter. Maybe the source of all arts is just the ability to marvel at the world. For me, the careful handling of the detail is not only a never-ending pleasure but also and above all it is meditation and infinite freedom. I take the liberty to show details and in this way create platforms for different interpretations. I find my ideas in the random nature of daily experiences and dreams. Theatre, music, literature and photography are my companions. To create something new out of this pool is a lust for life, and time is also a great material in this production process.

For me, my paintings seem to be an incessant and quiet search for our being, a special kind of science. I am interested in topics like evolving and decay, complex issues that are hard to understand. Painting gives me the opportunity to comprehend the world a little bit better.

In a world full of overstatements I am searching for the concrete in persons and objects, of accuracy in unsparing clarity.

If an intuitive idea of a picture flows through the soul to the canvas via the brush, then it is pure painting far beyond fashion and trends. Only dead fish swim with the stream.

Despite all planning in painting, there will always be things developing on the canvas beyond the consciousness of the painter. The preoccupation with every new painting changes me. My paintings surprise me again and again, they leave me perplexed. Maybe this is the impulse for the constant creation of new paintings.