My Painting Process

Since I returned to an artistic life in the middle of my twenties I chose Goethe's color theory and Steiner's considerations on the being of colors as my "North Pole Star" in the sky of painting. 

Practically my way is always beginning like a game with a color sound. But this is soon turning to a meditation: something that could be called conversation. Every work is a trial to give movement and life to it, in respect to the color beings.

My favorite way to beginning is a color polarity or triangle, a triad! The colors are thin and conquer some parts of the picture surface. By becoming intensified and overlapping each other form elements appear, which can be used (kept) or refused (canceled). The tendency to create figures out of these invitations give possibilities of composition and it is just up to me to let the forms appear or not. But this way of creation demands a lot of courage, especially in the medium of water colors, because there is almost no way to cancel a painted step of work. You can only go forth.

At any form element an inner image can be bound and a thinking process begins.

Therefor the observer often asks: what is that? ...willing to continue with his associations and critics etc.... For the painter this aspect is secondary! I try to introduce the motiv as far and as precise as the public could be invited through it to build its own imagination. Through the steps of color sound, rhythm, dynamic and form my work is ripening towards its achievement. For me the challenge consists in choosing the right moment to stop painting.

The question remains: when is a picture "finished"? 

If I push too far, too "concrete" the process of incarnating a motive, it will become very clear and easy to check and to recognize: this is a sunset, that is a sheep etc. But then the attention of the observer would be turned away from the painting's dynamic. Therefore I keep the painting "on its way of creation", as an invitation to its visitors, an invitation to continue the process by himself. He must feel, that the picture is not totally finished and remain curious and self creative.