Page 8 - Enamel & More

Although the academy brought me closer to the real landscapes, the real still lives,
models, ornaments etc. and that the copying of photographs was not considered as
art. I kept on copying in pencil and imitating in paint.
Yet. the use of photographs in the U.S. under the name photo realism, has become an
issue in painting and is often used as a handy tool by many artists. Flow realistic photo
realism may look, it remains a translation of reality in paint.

Since I could not appease myself with the thought that visual art actually is nothing
more than twisting reality and since I did not find a solution, neither in working
figuratively nor in working with different materials in attaining reality, I constantly
overshot my target.

The conversations with my grandfather in his atelier, or rather the patient listening
to his touching struggle of how the position of a leg was not right and he therefore
painted over it a cloth or something else, should have warned me for the torments that
accompany the making of art. I still was very young and the sorrow and involvement,
with now and then some pleasure in painting willed tulips in a Cologne vase or fish with
a half-peeled citron on a dish cloth, astonished me, whereas his involvement in me was
only minor and also, I considered myself, actually, much more important than all these
lifeless objects.

I liked the smell of paint and what attracted me also was the independence with
which decisions could be made. The freedom of acting with which you could make
disappear or reappear a whole image or part of it (which he regularly did). On the other
hand, I questioned the self-evidence with which a vase with flowers turned into paint
automatically had to be art.

These anecdotes illustrate attempts to evade the dependence and the dead-end trail
of form, material and the hand as a translation tool according to the traditional pattern.
My allergy of dependence and the resulting need of independence and also a relentless
conviction that in everything is a kernel of truth that is in equilibrium with itself has, in
the end. made me find a connection and a balance between the material, the form and
art and simultaneously to make the connection between myself and the reality.

Every idea depends on an appearance for its manifestation. I am dependent on
the material within my reach to express my independence. By attention for and
concentration on the independent value of the material I was able to diminish the
distance between the idea and reality, thinking and acting. That way the layers of
meanings and projections that have obstructed, the view of the material itself in the
course of history, have disappeared. Meditation exercises in the sixties have been an
instrument to learn to focus the attention on one thing without being distracted. This
way, things become materials again and are brought back to a neutral state of being.
A neutrality, almost a meaninglessness, in which wood becomes wood again, paper is
paper, stone is stone and a line is an act, a movement, to be able to form a new image.

Looking back, it is explicable that the tactile, the literal touchable properties of the
material, was the answer to the groping and the searching of the meaning and to

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