Long live art!

Oh, this gray! This desolation! Can we perhaps skip this season?

Every year it comes back to me without me having ordered it – this miserable wet, this drizzly weather. Nature is dying before our very eyes. It doesn’t help to look away. Anyone who didn’t make it to the sunny south in time has to go through it! Okay, that includes me.

Isn’t that poison for creativity? Where, pray tell, do I find the inspiration and courage for new, beautiful works and deeds?

“Hidden behind the gray is the white! Give it light!”

All right: a bit of pathos might help against the gloom. The gray veil of November certainly has secrets for each of us that can be revealed. In any case, I like to choose a bright white to brighten up the dull gray of this time of year. Because I don’t want to do away with or skip this month – I’m just too curious for that.

I also like to get involved in new experiments. This also helps when the weather is bad: I painted white on white. Really large areas with acrylic and a broad brush. That’s not normally my thing. Neither the color nor the large surface area. But an excursion into unfamiliar techniques is still important to me from time to time. Even if it’s just to find my own way again.

The white-on-white technique is also used in art therapy as an invitation to rediscover one’s own expression. Because if I don’t have to make everything visible right away, if I don’t reveal every color and shape of my work, it invites me to experiment. I dip the brush into the paint, run it over the surface, draw lines and create shapes. Yet I hardly leave a trace. It is an act of whispering – a play of gestures, virtuoso and free, without betraying the contours. I chose a thick application of paint for my experiment. This allowed me to create somewhat visible structures in the colors and play with the shadows. But the more glazed the paint, the more mysterious and free the result. This is good for taking a deep breath: just gliding the brush over the ground can be so liberating that the visible becomes less important. My recommendation: definitely try it out for yourself! 👍 🖌️

Perhaps we can even grow fond of this colorless time of mourning and funeral arrangements and simply engage in a time of pause. As an ally, November is no longer quite so bleak. Perhaps even comforting.

The realization that no growth lasts forever also has a healing effect. This also applies to our own artistic work. Taking a breather from the eternal higher, further, faster offers the chance to rethink many things, take a fresh look at the old and gather strength for the new.

This eternal competition saps our strength. Driven and rushed, panting for recognition and visibility, we block our view of what we actually want and hope for ourselves. Yet our own work should not primarily be created for others. After all, every work is essentially a self-portrait. We can never create anything else with our art. Of course, it is a great pleasure when our work is appreciated by others. But if we only create the work that we think others want, then we lose ourselves in it. Because with every work, we bring a piece of ourselves into the world. Every painting is a mirror, every sculpture, every performance, every composition shows a facet of ourselves. We can find ourselves in our creations.

Making my own work more beautiful in order to appear pleasing, making it ugly in order to shock, overloading it with messages in order to instruct, becoming increasingly shrill in order to attract attention…there are many ways to distance myself from myself with my own work. Of course, any of these ways can also be the right way to express myself. But every now and then it’s good to take a step back and ask myself: is my work still serving me? Because it’s not that easy to assign the many voices in my head: What do I want myself? And what do I allow to whisper to me?

November is a good time to ask myself these questions. I withdraw myself. I trust that the world will continue to turn on its own for a moment. I review the events of the past. Most things just want to be looked at so that they can dissolve into pleasure. This is my time.

Incidentally, white plays a major role in all my collages – especially if they are to be photographed. Because the white balance of the camera shows that white is not always white. The paper I prefer to work on is not pure white, but rather a natural, warm white. And with the first splash of color that I apply, the camera can possibly recolor the entire scene by giving the white a green tint or a red tint. Or the entire photographed work may take on a cold blue cast – depending on the smallest color accents I have placed in the work. Then it requires the photographer‘s intuition to restore the correct white. With this motif, I thought I was working with a clearly white Deutzie flower. The macro shot reveals the complexity and depth of even the smallest of shapes and colors. The petals may appear mainly white, but they sit in their fresh green calyx, which I have turned into a bird’s head here.

This tiny bird reminds me of the famous shot of Marilyn Monroe in a white dress standing on a ventilation shaft. But of course it should be emphasized that any similarities with real people are purely coincidental. Here as the little Monroe magpie.