making of

Formen und Farben

Im Frühjahr bin ich ein wenig gereist, hab Freunde, Bekannte und Familie besucht, einige Museen und Ausstellungen und hab meinen Kopf gefüllt mit vielen neuen Bildern und Erinnerungen. Natürlich ist da schon eine Menge drin im Kopf, aber von Zeit zu Zeit brauche ich neuen Input. Ich kann, ehrlich gesagt, nicht beschreiben, wie das funktioniert, ich merke nur, dass ich irgendwann "leer laufe" und "hungrig auf Neues" werde. Das kann alles mögliche sein, Theater, Bücher, Diskussionen, Museen, Ausstellungen und andere, neue Umgebungen.

Painting with cement

When creating the sunny house I became curious about using cement in my paintings. I quite liked the combination of glossy oil paint and raw cement and got in my mind to create a little series using such materials. Yellow will be followed by blue and red, always adding cement to it.
So, that’s the second painting: Rough.
The challenge lies in the application of such a rough material to canvas and thus I needed to explore how to mix different sorts of cement so it does not crack when dry.

Contrasts

Between all the house restoration work, I had time to do another painting. When doing a full house restoration we really start from the bottom, removing everything what was added to the original structure of house, leaving us with bare walls, without floors and ceilings, left with the rough, basic foundation.

When we are done with our restoration work, a shiny and beautiful surface is visible and make people feel welcomed.

A new painting

After a long pause, caused by a water damage in my little atelier and due to lots of renovation work, I started painting again.

This time, I layered oil paints over ash and washed them away again and again to create subtle effects. It’s a play of appearing and disappearing, of strong presence and nebulous absence. Like memories, they come and go, sometimes they are very clear and sometimes you wondering if an event really happened or if it is just in your imagination.

Plastering a wall with stucco

Many years ago, when we restored our house, I plastered my very first walls ever in our living room. I just came back from a one week training course where I learned the basics of wall plastering with lime, sand and marble powder. These walls were in a very rough condition, we had removed the old plaster, closed some holes with natural stones and here I came, ready to build up all the layers necessary before the final one could be done. Back then, I used sieved sand with lime and troweled it off.