The decisive phase in the creation of one of my pictures begins when disappointment or dissatisfaction make it my opponent. This is when I become aware that it is growing into an important partner to be taken seriously. I want to pull it over to where I am so that I can accept it, so that I can identify with it completely. This is often a desperate situation that is ultimately mastered with patience and distance. I turn the picture around so that it is facing the easel and wait until it seems to me that the time is ripe to let it call me again. In most cases, everything seems to be much easier then...
Statement 2
Sometimes the individual elements of my pictures pop out of my imagination spontaneously during the working process, and sometimes I call them up from “stored travel memories”. Often the themes develop playfully during the work. Nothing restricts me more than a preconceived, rigorous idea for a picture. Instead, it is much more common for me that the idea for a picture and its design emerge interdependently, i.e., during the working process new picture ideas can appear that are then later realised during the continued course of the work through the appropriate choice of colour and shape. The development of the picture takes place so to speak in a phased, gradual interplay between its design and its idea. Only in this way is the painter carried along by the cloud of “endless lightness”.
A prerequisite for the picture’s successful completion is nevertheless the attainment of a “certain determination”, or the willingness to fully accept the trying nature of this process. This is not always automatically possible.