the labyrinth way to painting
My first fascination with painting began at a very young age, but actually there was an even bigger fascination for nature and vision. Going out to see the world with my own eyes and thinking about it! And there were always fascinating things to see and to look at around in the wilderness of a garden, on my way to school, especially observing plants.
Then the paintings of my grandfather Alfred Liersch who used to wander around in the woods and paint his favourite landscapes and flowers from memory. Sometimes I could accompany him in the woods or watch him painting. He also drew animals for me and gave me my first oil painting set which I still use.
The first big exhibition which hit me was a show of Expressionist painters at the Brücke Museum in my hometown Berlin. The museum is quite far from where we lived but my parents had the habit to take me to museums or nature spots in West-Berlin in the 70ties and 80ties. I was then a child of maybe 10 to 12 years old.
At high school I was very much influenced by our art teacher Rainer Krienke who is an artist himself and painted everything, the walls in the art class were covered with a tropical wood, his camping car of course was painted, he spun and colorised his own wool to knit his wonderful pullovers and weave carpets.
Art got me, I was hooked and many exhibitions and journeys to museums all over the world followed. First with my parents, great to remember Il Cenacolo of Leonardo or the Uffizi in the late 80ties, when it was actually possible to see the paintings and not people standing in front of it covering the view by taking photographs. Later on my own with a great and ongoing passion.
But as a practical person I never really believed I would be a painter myself. And in the late 80ties painting was almost dead. Installations, performances, video and computer art and graphic design were trendy at that time. The tradition of teaching techniques in a profound way has almost nowhere survived. So I developed a passion for architecture, printing, art history, political activism, languages and graphic design. In this domain I worked in Germany, France and The Netherlands for more than 20 years.
Nevertheless, I always did paint in some way and I often lived around painters and artists. Also during my study time of "Visuelle Kommunikation" at the UdK Berlin, I was at least as often in the department of art as in the department of design and film. It's only now that I give myself the opportunity to explore this first and biggest desire to express my observations and thoughts through painting.
In my painting process I first have to know what I want to paint and it has to make sense in a way, I prepare everything according to my vision, then I try techniques. This also includes studying art history and the work of other painters, materials and techniques, working processes and forming a point of view. Before I start, I need a general framework, and then I love to let myself go in the interplay of acting and observing. I like paintings that express nature in the process of painting itself and I like to explore the savoir-faire of painters past and present.
I hope the examples of my practice somehow resonate with your own observations and thoughts. It would be a great pleasure for me to get to know some of your thoughts. I would be happy to respond to serious comments which can be send to me via the contact sheet.