My inspiration: structures and fragments in micro- and macrocosm. The earth as a work of art, the mystery of emergence and decay...
"Morphic worlds" wherever you look
Natural structures and highly complex fragmenting of all kinds occur everywhere on earth, in the microcosm as well as in the macrocosm. But not only telescopes and microscopes give us perspectives into a world full of form and beauty, but they can also be found with the naked eye everywhere in nature, in the fascinatingly diverse shapes of shells, in the sand plays of the deserts, the bizarre rock formations of the mountains or the layers of the earth, in the play of waves in the sea, the filigree and complex patterns of roots and treetops, sediments, rivers, lava flows, crystals, minerals, rock and cell structures - in fact in all of animate and inanimate nature.
Also our body's own morpholgy of cell associations, veins, nerve ramifications, organ structures, bones, tendons, epithelial tissues, fluid behavior etc. offers a good example that nature shows itself everywhere in its unique beauty through structured forms and colors, which above all have one thing in common: They are always different, always unique, and never boring because they never repeat themselves exactly. For example, every grain of sand on earth is unique, every snowflake that has ever fallen is unique, and every leaf in a beech forest is like no other.
Nevertheless, even in the infinitely diverse and ever-changing structure and dynamics of nature, one recognizes a great commonality, a kind of "hand of God" that seems to weave through everything, structuring and shaping the microcosm and macrocosm in a way that is strangely familiar to us, to which we have a special aesthetic relationship and which we like to absorb and capture with our senses. These structures and fragmentations form a relaxing, soothing counterpoint to the "smooth" world of architecture and everyday objects that we have created, where straight lines and geometric surfaces and shapes dominate.
In my painting collages, I try to recreate fascinating formations of our complex natural environment by banning them with colors and various painting media under the course of more or less controlled physical and chemical processes on various image carriers. As an admixture to my acrylic paints and the self-made emulsion paints I use mostly wood chips, but also sand, marble powder or other differently granular structure givers, which harden filigree.
And nature "paints" along. Various laws of nature, such as gravity, diffusion, capillarity, temperature, evaporation, fermentation, resinification, etc. act with and ensure that I am surprised again and again during the individual phases of the creation of my images themselves. The liquids applied at different times, such as alcohols, varnishes, resins, binders and wetting agents, as well as drying processes of varying intensity and speed, provide for ever more astonishing results, which I can control only in part. That is what I want.
The real art here is to be active in shaping without disturbing the decisive processes that run on their own, but also without leaving them exclusively to their own devices. My creative task therefore consists above all in giving direction to various processes and not losing sight of the overall concept or the decisive pictorial idea, which in my series of works 2 is usually present from the beginning. One difficulty here is to recognize when, for example, a certain intermediate phase is finished and can be further processed, or when a picture is finished at all. In work series 1 this is completely different. There I consciously let myself in on the moment, create freely from the moment and do not know beforehand what will come out in the end. This creates works that I ultimately influence as little as possible myself - a source of great joy and immediacy.