I am many things. I have accomplished a lot. Some even call "me, myself and I" a piece of art.
Long time in my life I worked as a project manager, organized management structures in corporations and coached groups and individuals to better communicate.
Lately, I am developed a passion for restoring old houses and I became an artist. I love colours and experiment with anything crossing my way to turn it into abstract art.
Harald Huss, the vice chairmen of the Kunstverein Nürtingen and one of my early professional supporters wrote the following about my paintings:
About the art of Christine Graf
How to start? Christine Graf came to the art of painting via the plastering of walls and their coloured arrangement. It’s here that her painting begins, using the wall’s surface as a painting surface, she covers the walls with her colours. She relies on ancient recipes, adds her own experiences, experiments and designs. Her walls awaken the viewer’s own associations when seeing the images and discovering the wall’s surface as a painting. This aroused the curiosity and interest of the artist to devote her wall techniques to canvas.
The shape of her monochrome surfaces emerges from the used painting support - square on square. The primed canvas is always also a colouring agent for Christine Graf, and as such her art of painting could also be called a constant overpainting. The tool for her art is a taloche (a blade), a smoothing trowel used in Italian stucco techniques. This tool has a tactile fascination, made of stainless steel, equipped with a noble wooden handle which nestles into the hand. With this taloche, she applies herself-mixed colours - using pigments from the ochre quarries in Roussillon, marble powder and various kinds of binders.
The canvas lies horizontally in front of the artist, the taloche is drawn over the painting support - body movements from right to left, left to right, from top to bottom, bottom to top - orbiting the painting surface. Thus, layer after layer is created and the painting surface becomes a tableau. Layers of paint penetrate the canvas, the edges of which are also included in the painting. The artist applies up to 30/40 coats of paint. Each representing Christine Graf’s thoughts, feelings and memories, deposited in sediments of colours, the mirrors of her soul. In her works, colour is light and appearance - highly intuitive. The first application of colour, her first gestures, determine to a certain extent everything that follows.
For Christine Graf, to paint means to write colour and pigments, create chromatic inscriptions, to perform libidinal applications on the colour (Lyotard). So to speak, inscription work. Graf's paintings thus contain sensitive and emotional potentials. They enable vivid levels of vision, evoke conceivably real perceptions, although they are in essence autonomous. Thus, the colour charts indicate the predominant colour in the coloured events on the canvas. In Christine Graf's painting, the image is not the goal, she does not want finality, but sees it as open-ended. Her art of painting appears to be permeated with light, emanates silence and becomes the place of contemplation, "the scent of time". (Chul Han)
Enjoy reading my blog posts and exploring my art. Contact me if you are interested in one of my paintings or if you like me to show them at an exhibition.