Happy accidents

In my work, there are many happy accidents, and this lithograph, which is called HAZE, is one of my favourite accidents. I actually was trained in lithography, but that was a long time ago, and when I started to work with it again many years later, I didn't have my notes from school with me, and I didn't remember the steps exactly – painting and printing on stone involves a rather complex chemical process in several steps.  

So, I just started to experiment. Obviously, I did something wrong (and only afterward learned what it was: I used the wrong ink) and the image kept changing as I printed the edition, and the lady smoking a pipe was slowly shrouded in smoke. I wasn't exactly happy when I printed this but when I was done, I realized that I had printed something wonderful, something that I could have never conjured up. Instead of an edition of eight identical lithographs, of eight small artworks, I had one big artwork which was much more interesting. The accident had added another dimension to my artwork.

And this is the beauty of mistakes – they open doors and allow us to explore ways we would have never noticed. I wasn't born a perfectionist, but I was definitely raised to be one, just as it happens to many children.  Perfectionism can have its good sides, but it also ruins a lot, especially if it is not in our nature, but something forced upon us. It makes us scared of the wonderful unknown, the magical things that happen when we surrender to the process and give up control, and not only give up the fear of failure but embrace it.

The opposite of perfectionism is not sloppiness or laziness. It's keeping ourselves open to all possibilities: It's to work how children work, not work, but play, not walking down a pre-defined road, but to roam, to explode, and not to be frustrated about mistakes, but to be curious about them, and often delighted.

It took me many years to lose my perfectionism and to stop bothering about mistakes, and start to see them as an invitation to new, unexpected things instead. In the beginning, it was not a conscious decision, not something I wanted to change about my work or something I wanted to teach myself. Because, of course, no perfectionist has the desire to be less perfect.

Instead, I was taught without asking for it, without knowing that I needed it. Printmaking taught me a lot about it, and also, on a deeper level, spending a long time in places on this earth where perfection and routine planning and controlling things did not matter as much as it matters where I was born, far away places where the streets are full of magic and life and where serendipity and wonder is weaved into the fabric of everyday life.

My work has improved greatly from these lessons, and it has humbled my ego: Because now I not only know, but I also feel that it is not only me who creates my artworks, but I'm collaborating with something else. I’m collaborating with chance, with my surroundings, with the unknown, with serendipity, with everything around me. I do my best, but only if I submit to these forces, which are bigger than me, I can use them in my work. And these are great gifts from which my work benefits enormously, because these are things I could never do from my through my own strength; nobody can.

Working like this feels good, and freeing. I now feel like I was when I was a small child, when I was still free, and I think about what Picasso said: "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."

I also know that more and more children bear the burden of having to be perfect. I have experienced children drawing in my workshops with adults standing next to them, telling them what they painted wrong. It reminds me of when I was in kindergarten, having just discovered how checkered patterns work, which fascinated me enormously, and I started to experiment a lot with color overlays, until one day, when I decided to make a huge checkered pattern, filling the whole sheet of paper with it. When my kindergarten teacher saw this, she got angry and said: You are wasting the paper! Correct that and draw something properly! And so, I couldn’t finish my giant pattern and turned it into something I assumed the teacher deemed proper: a castle with princesses. I still have this drawing.

There is so much damage done to children, so for me, it has become important to antagonise this in my workshops consciously. I want to provide a space where children can retain their creative playfulness, and where adults can regain it. When I do workshops for children in my studio, I tell them: There is only one rule in the studio: There is no right or wrong (and keep your fingers away from the printmaking press when someone is printing :-D )

Today, I mostly work without the fear of failure and the pressure of being perfect. I still want to do work that is well done, but my brush now lies very loosely in my hands. There is just as much failure in my work as there was when I was a perfectionist, but the failure now is integrated into my work, and my work is only benefiting from it.

I work with curiosity now, not with pressure. Still (or even more than before, because now I work a lot with ceramics), there are many things in my work that don't go well, that don't look good, that have failed, ceramics that break or tear, that ultimately die. Mostly I just accept it and I don't care, sometimes it hurts, but not for long, I just move on. Because I now know that failures are necessary, just as in nature, where things are growing in abundance and without measure and where many things rot and die along the process, but they do not get lost, they remain part of the whole: They are the humus from which new things grow.

The price and pricelessness of art

Some people take a ceramic plate of mine into their hands and they understand everything with their eyes and their hands and their heart.

But other people don't understand the work that lies behind a handmade piece of art and don't understand why a handmade and handpainted plate costs more than a plate from IKEA.

Firstly, before we begin even talking about the actual work required to create a piece, there are years and decades of training and study behind me without which I would not be able to do what I do. So, behind every piece of art, there is a lot more work than the actual work it takes to create the actual artwork.

No artist creates an artwork out of the void, it is the result of a long, tedious, and often exhausting (and no, not always fun!) process. Every piece is part of a whole creative world and echoes that world and everything that came before and after it.

The work process of a porcelain piece spans several weeks. First, in my ceramic studio, I open a bag of porcelain, take out a lump, and start to shape my piece. Then, I let it dry and when it is fairly dry, I work on the details with a sponge. After around a week, when it is completely dry, it is ready to fire (or sometimes, it tore in the drying process and I can trash it).

When I have created enough pieces, I fill the kiln. The idea is to fit as many pieces in the kiln as possible and it is a bit like Tetris.

I bisque-fire them at 900°. During the firing, I can’t work in my studio because the firing produces toxic gases. After three days, I can open the kiln. At this stage, some pieces have been cracked or broken as well (in ceramics, one learns to live with loss. Lots of loss ;-))

Now I can paint my pieces and when they are painted, I cover them with glazes. Glazing is the part of the process I dislike the most – it's boring work and it requires a lot of accuracy – and cleaning. But I really really love glazes, so the work is worth it!

When the pieces are glazed, I place them in the kiln again. This time, they are not allowed to touch each other because the glaze will make them stick to each other, so much fewer pieces fit in the kiln now. I fire them again, this time at 1250°, and then, after three more days, the best moment has arrived: The opening of the kiln!

I open the kiln like a child on Christmas eve. What comes out of the kiln is not only my creation, but also the creation of the fire, something which is completely out of my control, and completely magic. There is a beauty I could not have created by myself.

And also, some pieces have cracked or broken at this stage of the process, or the painting on the ceramic surface didn't turn out well – and I have to throw them away as well.

The work process does not stop here. The ceramic pieces need to be photographed, the photographs need to be edited, and shop listings and social media posts need to be made. Ceramics need to be packed and shipped, invoices need to be written. The studio needs to be cleaned, rent needs to be paid, and materials need to be ordered and paid.

There is a lot of work behind and around every piece. It's like a chunk of my time and attention has been frozen into shape, a chunk of time I will never be able to get back but is forever embodied in the artwork.

But for me, this is just a small part of the value of an artwork. It is not the time and effort alone, but the energy that is in the piece, and it's an energy that contains everything that I've learned and seen and done, everything that has inspired me, and it makes every artwork a member of a family of things that talk to each other and are forever connected with each other. They are speaking of life itself and this is what makes them precious for me.

The Far Province

The Far Province
May 2021

Galicia is a remote Spanish province – once thought to be the end of the world, it still sometimes feels like the end of the world, a world where one is still at the mercy of nature, her wild waves (it’s no coincidence that the Costa de Morte, the coast of death, is located here) her endless rain and storms and the gigantic piles of cumulus clouds she sends racing across the sky. In times like these, water creeps into your house and makes the windows cry, and with it the cold creeps into your bones and doesn’t leave for weeks and months, and no fire is enough to warm your fingers.

Nature, having invaded your home and your bones, drives you out of your house right into her arms, and you walk along black rivers seamed by shipwrecks and into a forest of dark, wet trees. You pass by houses made of stone that have been abandoned for an eternity, houses in pain, taken over by gravity and ghosts and moss, and on your way back home you pick some pink camellias from the three trees that grow next to the old monastery, that beloved flower only blooming in winter, contradicting the very gloom that brings her to life. Looking up the trees you notice that the blossoms are already yellowing; it is a sign that warmer times are coming soon.

And then, finally, as announced by the dying camellias, spring comes and rewards those who endured winter with fragrant forests, and the dark indigo in the bays turns turquoise, and the clouds become light-weight and white, travelling through the sky like sailing ships.

The strangers on the street are not hiding behind their umbrellas anymore; the sun shining into their faces makes them talkative now, and they start to tell you the secrets of their now blooming country, of what lives in their villages and forests, and in the worlds in between, and they talk about the mystical islands in the South, islands that really exist, although you don’t dare to believe in them.

On days like these, you don’t want to go back home anymore, you almost don’t want to go to the printmaking workshop anymore, where, still, the dark images of winter wait to be brought to light by you.

Those are the days when you don’t want to go home and you almost don’t want to go into the studio anymore, days that almost make you wish you were a flower seller, you want to roam the forests for days, looking for flowers and branches out of which you will make bouquets and wreath which will tell from your walks through the hills, and you want to sell them on the big square, together with the market women, who come down from their gardens on the hills twice a week, carrying baskets full of eggs, home-made cheese and huge loaves of dark bread, and the last lemons of the winter, which are so big that you need two hands to hold them.

For the forest, only the narrow hours between the end of the day and the beginning of the night have been left, you step into a light forest and you leave a dark one.

But you know that the days are getting longer now…

Die Ferne Provinz 

Galizien ist eine abgelegene Provinz in Nordspanien – einst glaubte man, hier läge das Ende der Welt, und manchmal fühlt es sich noch immer so an – eine Welt, in der man der Natur völlig ausgeliefert ist, eine Natur, die ruhelos ist und erratisch, die haushohe Wellen gegen die Küste wirft und Wolkenmassen über den Himmel jagt und als nächtelange Stürme rastlos durch Wälder und Dörfer wühlt, begleitet von endlosem Regen. Es ist kein Zufall, dass die Costa da Morte, die Todesküste, hier liegt, in einem Winter wie diesem muss sie ihren Namen wohl bekommen haben.

An Tagen wie diesen dringt das Wasser durch die klammen Mauern in dein Haus und bringt deine Fenster zum Weinen, und mit dem Wasser kriecht die Kälte in deine Knochen und geht nicht mehr weg, für Wochen und Monate, und kein Feuer ist warm genug, um deine Finger zu wärmen.

Dieselbe Natur, die in dein Haus eingedrungen ist, treibt dich jetzt hinaus aus deinem Haus, direkt in ihre Arme. Du gehst an schwarzen Flüsse entlang, die von abgewrackten Booten gesäumt sind, und durch den Wald voller dunkler Bäume, die, obwohl die Wolken schon weitergezogen sind, immer noch voller Regen sind.

Du gehst an Häusern vorbei, in denen längst niemand mehr wohnt, es sind sterbende Häuser, mit herausgebrochenen Fassaden, Häuser, die im Fallen begriffen sind, bewohnt nur noch von Geistern und Moos und dem ewigen Regen.

Auf dem Rückweg pflückst du einen Strauß pinker Kamelien von den drei Kamelienbäumen, die auf der Straße vor dem alten Kloster wachsen. Die Kamelie, diese wundersame Blüte, die nur im Winter blüht, und die in ihrer Üppigkeit und Fleischlichkeit der Schwermut, in der und in der allein sie gedeiht, widerspricht. Dir fällt auf, dass einige der Blütenblätter bereits am Rand vergilben: Ein Zeichen, dass bald wärmere Zeiten kommen.

Und dann, endlich, wie von den sterbenden Kamelien angekündigt, kommt der Frühling und beschenkt diejenigen, die im Winter ausgeharrt haben, mit duftenden Wiesen und Wäldern, plötzlich ist Licht im Meer, die Sonne kommt an Land, und das dunkle Indigo in den Buchten verwandelt sich in helles Türkis, und die Wolken werden leicht und weiß und ziehen durch den Himmel wie Segelschiffe.

Die Fremden auf der Straße verstecken sich jetzt nicht mehr hinter ihren großen Regenschirmen: Die Sonne, die ihnen ins Gesicht scheint, macht sie gesprächig, und sie erzählen dir die Geheimnisse ihres jetzt blühenden Landes, davon, was in ihren Dörfern und Wäldern lebt und in den Welten dazwischen, und sie erzählen dir von den mystischen Inseln im Süden, die wirklich existieren, aber an die zu glauben du kaum wagst.

An Tagen wie diesen willst du nicht mehr nach Hause gehen, und fast willst du nicht mehr in die Druckwerkstatt gehen, wo, immer noch, dunkle Bilder des Winters darauf warten, von dir ans Licht geholt zu werden.

An diesen Tagen wünschst du dir, eine Blumenverkäuferin zu sein, du willst tagelang durch die Wälder streifen, Blumen und Zweige suchen, aus denen du Sträuße und Kränze bindest, die von deinen Spaziergängen durch die Hügel erzählen, und sie auf dem großen Platz zu verkaufen zusammen mit den Marktfrauen, die zweimal in der Woche von ihren Gärten auf den Hügeln herunterkommen, die Körbe voller Eier bringen, selbstgemachten Käse und riesige Laibe dunkles Brot, und die letzten Zitronen des Winters, die so groß sind, dass du sie in beiden Händen halten kannst. 

Für den Wald sind dir nur die engen Stunden zwischen Tagesende und Nachtbeginn geblieben, du betrittst einen hellen Wald und verlässt einen dunklen.

Aber du weißt, dass die Tage nun länger werden…

The muse

Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye. It also includes the inner pictures of the soul.
Edvard Munch

This artwork, called Leira (which means field in Galego) is a monotype print with a face that appeared to me one day while painting in Betanzos, a small village in Galicia, a remote province in Northern Spain. I'm not a studio artist; I need inspiration, and I like and need to create my artworks in the context of different surroundings. Galicia is one of my favorite places to hunt for these inner images. Actually, one doesn't need to hunt for them, really one shouldn’t; they just appear, the less one tries to "seek inspiration", the more probable it is that one finds it. Inspiration has nothing to do with thinking, and everything to do with feeling.

Inspiration doesn't like force, and whatever inspiration is, it is certainly a free spirit, and a stubborn one. It comes when it wants to, not when you want. Inspiration comes to me when I walk, when I work, and most of all, when I let go. 

I no longer wait to have “an idea” and I certainly don’t think they are “mine”. Ideas are floating around us all the time, like invisible butterflies, you can’t catch them, but if you’re lucky, one of them sits on your shoulder. 

In Galicia, you find inspiration between the trees in the forest, or behind that beautiful green hill, or in the image of a ship on the horizon, or in one of the old fisherman’s bars. I just walk, I don't think and I don't search, I let my soul soak in that beautiful (and sometimes not so beautiful) world around me. 
And then I go back to the studio, take my brush, and images will appear. But because they want to.
Through the years, I’ve learned how to play with the muse, although it was, and is, not always that easy, as this poem reminds me of: 

Two weeks

In the first week, you meet your demons. 
They pull on your pencil when you draw, and fill your mind with lead. 
They step in your way in the middle of the forest. 
They push your muse and make her stumble – 
and out of the mirror, they make faces at you.
Your demons make sure you know that they don’t love you 
(but then again, they don’t love anyone). 
And you know it’s best just to let them be 
– like the ants, the mosquitoes, and that gigantic cricket in your ear. 
Eventually, they will get bored and leave. 

Then, one day, arrives an angel. 
She opens your shutters and makes your day soft. 
She breathes life into the world, and you breathe out. 
She hands you your papers (the ones with the demon sketches) 

and leaves (her visits are always short)
And she leaves you feeling blessed and tall. 
The next day, the muse returns from the hills. 
Her pale face has gained some color – her cheeks are rosy and busy. 
She sits down with you at the table and says: Let’s start! 
You look at her, astonished but determined, 
and you know that half of your time is already over. 
And you bow your head and begin the work. 
And the day is endless and you fill it out effortlessly.  

I wrote this in my notebook two years ago in another country, in another village, in Castagno de Piteccio, a little mountain village in Tuscany. I had been invited there to participate in a two-week-long artist residency, and it happened to me what had happened to me many times before and what I guess most artists are experiencing in some or the other way: I had two weeks to develop a project, and I immediately I got into the vicious circle of pressurizing myself and ending up in total despair, just before, miraculously, everything all of a sudden started to flow. In this case, it started to flow with this poem. 

The muse wants to be seduced, not to be forced. Start to draw, line by line, and it will be one line, you don’t know which, that will be so irresistible for the muse (her other name is association) that she will jump on it and guide you the way. “The muse will come, but it will have to find you working”, says Picasso.
There is no magic way to be more “efficient”, more “productive”, “faster”. The muse refuses these things. Because the absence of these things is not the problem, the problem is that we see it as a problem. 

The artistic process is not linear. It is cyclical, and there is a time to sow, to grow, and to harvest. Good things need time. It is better to accept this and give oneself the time one needs, to surrender, to let go. Going with the flow also means accepting that the flow sometimes comes to a halt for a little while. It is up to us whether the time we spend inviting the muse is a punishment or a gift. If you have time (and patience, of course), it can be a wonderful gift. Searching for the muse with open eyes and an open heart becomes a creative act in itself – it is one of the most beautiful ways of interacting with the world. The muse playing hide and seek with you is a punishment only in the framework of obligations and expectations – the muse wanders around in far forests, or above the clouds, god knows where, while we desperately wait for her in the city, in our studios, in universities, sitting at our desks. This is reality. 

Unlike us, the ancient Greeks did not cherish the illusion that our ideas are something that is coming from inside ourselves. For them, ideas and inspiration come from the genius, which is an entity existing outside ourselves, originally a guardian spirit, and which is etymologically linked to “giving birth”. Every human being has their own “genius”, and all ideas we have are given to us by them. And so I like to see creativity not as an act, something I execute by myself, alone, but an interaction, a collaboration. Abandoning the idea that it is all in our control, which has always been an illusion in the first place, and embracing the fact that everything in this world is a collaboration, and that there is a genius, a muse, an angel, however you want to call it, somewhere out there, coming for help eventually, makes things a lot easier. We lend a face to the faceless, and a creative block in the shape of a mischievous demon who has come to make faces at us, and who we know will eventually leave, is a little bit easier to bear. 

Since I wrote this poem, I’ve become a lot better at dealing with my demons and trusting my angel and my muse*. I have learned to arrange myself with my demons, not only laughing at them but also laughing with them. If they want me to draw nonsense for three days before getting any result, I’ll give it to them. I’ll have to, anyway. 

I have also learned that, no matter where I am, my angel is always with me, and I’ve learned to let my muse get out of sight, let her lost in the dark forest, and trust her always to come back to me. 

____________________________

*If you have read Gabriel Garcia Llorcas Theory and play of the duende, you will have noticed that my triangle of angel, muse and demon, alludes to the triangle he describes in his text, except that I have replaced Llorca’s Duende with the demon, which of course is an entirely different thing than the Duende of course – its opposite, actually. 

The men of the South and the men of the North

You don’t remember in which country or year it was, it does not matter. In a mountain village, not far away from that city as old as time, you meet a man. He has dark eyes and plays the Tambur like a young god, and one night, you kiss him and you stay with him for some time. Days, weeks, or months, who knows – it becomes time beyond time.

It is the time of the pomegranate harvest, and your lover lives in a tiny house in a pomegranate grove overlooking the village. You sleep on the carpets your lover spreads on the floor every evening, underneath an enormous window that fills itself with wind and fragrances and sparkling stars at night, and one night, your lover points out the Pleiades and tells you that this is what his name, which you have long forgotten, means in his language, Pleiades.

Your presence in this house is as forbidden as the wine your lover brings at night. But there is no point in hiding, everybody knows that you are in the village. Everybody knows that you are here, the foreigner, the woman in the house of the man. Sometimes, you are a little bit afraid that the bearded men will come and knock at the door and drag you out. But if you have learned something here, it is to give yourself into the hands of people, to trust, which is not a means to survive, but the only way to live.

Above the river, there is an abandoned church. You only know that it’s a church because they told you, it is a ruin now, sad and unrecognizable, rapidly falling apart, a building beyond hope. The walls of the church, on which once there might have been frescoes of Mary and Jesus, are now covered with graffiti speaking of the names of couples, the testimony of lovers who have found an improbable refuge for their love in this building. You can only tell that it is a church because sometimes, you see candles burning in the arch of an abandoned window. You wonder who it is that brings those candles because you have been told that all Christians of this village, which once was a Christian village, are long gone.

One day, your lover leads you out from the village, through the green hills, through the forest. He knows every plant and rock in this landscape, but today, he wants to show you something else. He stops at a small gate, and he calls a name (you have also forgotten that name)
An old man comes out, he looks like Saint Nicolaus, with a big, white beard and friendly eyes. He, too, has a tiny house, and then you sit in his kitchen next to a wood-burning stove and shiny red pots and walls decorated with dried onion and garlic, a kitchen like in a fairy tale.
To your surprise, he speaks perfect, accent-free Oxford English. He tells you that he lived in the UK for decades. This man is educated, interesting, sophisticated, and he seems completely out of place in this forest, in this mountain village full of pomegranate farms and shisha restaurants. He also has these occasional bits of bitterness, of sadness in him which he does not hide and which don’t need to be explained. You know it from other people here.

The man who looks like Saint Nicolaus and talks like an English gentleman asks you if you want to try his wine. He made it himself, your lover adds. The color of the wine is gold and amber, and it tastes sweet and dense, like honey and raisins.
The back door of his house opens to an enormous garden. It is intensely green, lush, and abundant, there are vegetables and fruit, red pepper and cucumber and tomatoes everywhere. It is well-tended and tidy, and you ask yourself how one person could possibly tend to such an enormous garden alone.

You walk through that garden like a bird flies through the sky. This garden is like paradise, perfect, ready, ripe, waiting to be explored. Through the garden, you walk up the hill, and there is another house, a dream house, with a lot of glass and carved wood, as it is the tradition there, and inside there are colorful carpets and musical instruments and walls of books. And something in your chest recognizes something, and a yearning that already contains its very fulfillment rises from your heart, it is a feeling that is sweet and hard to bear at the same time, everything is here, and yet something is missing.
Your lover sits down at the piano, another instrument he plays virtuously, and you stand in that moment, and it is as if you had come home. Just be in this house and know this garden around you, and to be hidden in the forest and the hills, and all this wrapped in the endless desert of the South. I want to be lost here.
This village is famous in the South. People come here from far away to find a bit of freedom in the forest; the village is full of abandoned houses and shady restaurants, where travellers smoke shisha and eat kebab underneath the pine trees (you’ve never been in one, your lover brings you fresh bread and aubergine mousse and dates every night). But in this season, most of the time these places are empty, with loud music blaring from loudspeakers for no one.

What is this hidden treasure, you say to your lover. Why is this a secret, the world needs to see this, it is precious, it is incredible! I didn’t know that this little village had such a gem! Why is he hiding it!
Your lover tells you that this paradise has not always been hidden. Here was a restaurant once, he tells you, but the authorities closed it, because the man had sold weed, and he does not get a license anymore. And so his paradise turned into his prison.
What you like to remember most about this man and his garden: The grapes he gave you from his vines, of which every single one tasted so distinctively different that it seemed to be impossible, almost as if each of them were a different kind of fruit.

…

And sometimes, you also think of the men of the North. The mystical friend who you first met in the South – he played the flute for you because you couldn’t speak each other’s language. Years later, you met him again in the North, and in the meantime, he had taught himself to speak English.
One late afternoon, after the merciless sun had lost some of its power, he took you for a hike, and there, in a grove high up on the mountains, he lit a fire and brewed herbal tea for you in a little tin teapot he had brought in his backpack, and you said, this is the best tea I ever had, and he looked at you and said: Actually, for me, as well.

Somewhere on the way, he tells you that he needed to stop, do you mind, he asks you, you don’t mind, and he figures out the right direction and starts to pray, while you sit on a rock nearby and write. And something connected you in that moment, because you knew that he was thinking of you in his prayer, and he knew that your writing included him. He finished, and you continued to walk in silence, you didn’t talk a lot, you didn’t need to, and only years after you spoke of this moment, smiling at each other without seeing each other, thousands of miles apart.
On the way down, it became dark, you groped your way back down to the last hill over the valley, and in the last valley you stopped at a hut, there were some mountain men with horses, and a veranda where you sat down on an old carpet and ate scrambled eggs served in an old iron pan, talking about the nature of God, you don’t remember what you had to say about the nature of God back then, but you remember that your friend told you that he liked to imagine that God as woman because once God had appeared to him in his dream as one.

And then in the North, there is also the image of an old man sitting on the ground in front of a Mosque, reading an old copy of the SPIEGEL Magazine. It was his way of learning German, reading every article word by word and underlining every word he didn’t know, and then waiting for German tourists to translate them to him. There were not many words underlined, and they were so difficult that they were really hard to explain.

Later at night, you meet him in a park, on a bench, where you talk for hours, under the pine trees and later under the stars. The old man reading the SPIEGEL in front of the mosque with his excellent German is a poor retired shoemaker, and he tells you his story, which is full of hardship and screaming injustice. In his story, you find a is a sadness that is greater than his story – because this is not an unusual story, but a typical one, one that you had heard many times in different forms, with different names and different faces.
Then he tells that if you want to get home safely, it’s time for you to get home now, and you say goodbye. The next day, you leave for the South.

In some mystical traditions, God is imagined as a great weaver, a woman weaving time and space. And in this great carpet, you imagine human lives as colorful threads, entangling and detangling, creating a beautiful pattern with (and for) each other for a moment before the great weaver, with her infinite number of fingers, picks up the threads and carries on weaving you.
In a kaleidoscopic moment, ephemeral and sparkling, their existence is grazing your existence. For a moment, you connect with each other‘s essence. Not all of them you really got to know, and you know that some of them you will never meet again, but you’re glad you know that they exist. You like to remember them, and you know that to remember each other means to carry fragments of each other within us.
We’ve become witnesses of each other, and that’s the beauty of life, I guess, to become a witness to the beauty of each other’s existence, to recognize each other, which means to recognize ourselves in the other, and maybe, to tell about it.

Living with the gods

Last year I created several artworks inspired by Melusina, the two-tailed mermaid, a figure that really fascinates me – the Melusina is an old matriarchal symbol uniting the erotic and the motherly aspect of the female nature, two aspects we have been gaslighted by patriarchy to perceive as a contradiction but which, of course, always have been two sides of one and the same coin. 

These are two of my favorite works, an aluminum sculpture I created after a papercut and a lithography. These two were ordered together by an art collector from Vienna. In the last years, a few collectors have mentioned to me that they feel that certain artworks they purchased from me protect and guard their homes, and I have to admit that my artwork being perceived that way makes me happy – because sometimes, some of my figures also remind me of old guardian spirits. 

It is, of course, not difficult to tell where they come from. What has influenced my work the most are my journeys, and what I discovered on them: From ancient temples on the Arabian peninsula where weather and time has washed away the faces and limbs of deities to the archaic smiles of greek goddesses after being kissed by Buddha, to the endless strips of Italian Frescoes repeating the stories of their holy book over and over, Islamic miniature painters veiling the faces of their saints with flames, and mythological creatures in the patterns of carpets, to deities so old that their names have been forgotten by everyone and new ones had to be invented, and most importantly, the thousands and thousands of deities living in India. 

For most of the time in human history, art and religion have been closely intertwined. Religion always has needed art, but art doesn’t need religion and has turned away from it, for the best reasons. But as enlightened as we might be, or think we are, there is and always will be a great need of the human soul to surround itself with magic. 

In the West though, we no longer feel the need for deities, and much less to lend a face to them: Our gods have started to fade away. Sometimes we go into a church and in the dim light of a candle we see a blackened altarpiece that depicts the gods and goddesses of yesterday. They look half-asleep, turned away from us, as if they were behind veils. They have become museal. It is clear that they are not amongst us anymore. 

In other places in the world, the gods are still alive. Just go South, perhaps to some Mediterranean islands, and in every corner you find shrines where a candle burns day and night, burning for the Virgin Mary, who once was Venus, who once was Aphrodite, who once was Al-Uzza, who once was Inanna. 

Big bright gods are ruling now great parts of the world, each of them ruling in a totalitarian manner that leaves no space for any other god, much less a goddess, but the dark corners he (it’s always a he) spares, because he doesn’t like darkness and he doesn’t like corners, are the place where small deities live. 

In the East, you find all sorts of creatures protecting spaces humans have created for themselves – rooms, households, temples, streets. They live on the margins of our lives in their niches and tiny houses, almost like the small animals sharing the spaces of us humans, and I must admit that it has happened to me that I mistook a god’s house for a birdhouse. Everything and anything can be a god, because god, of course, can be everything and anything: A bird, a stone, a sexual organ even.

Unlike the big god, this old monopolist, who’s grown so tall he has become out of control, a caricature almost, these small deities co-exist in some kind of spiritual democracy with humans, and with other deities. They‘re not aloof creatures who sit clouds and judge, but they live amongst us, and their tasks are humble and important. They are our spiritual housemates: If you feed them, they teach you that what you nourish nourishes you. They provide company, blessing, protection, mutual care, characteristics in which they, again, resemble certain pets. Others are mirrors of aspects of ourselves or of aspects the world we like to be reminded of, some even are a way for people who have died to continue to exist in some way. 

There are many reasons for a god to exist. 

But most importantly, they are representatives of the other, or however you might call it, they lend a human face to that which is faceless and make it something you can face, something you can address: They are a way to communicate with to something that is too big to be communicated with. You can talk to them, and they stand and listen, and I think this is their most important aspect: 
They are an embodiment of a sentiment human beings need to survive: That on this earth, we are, essentially, in a safe place. Through them, our deepest inside can communicate with the farthest outside.

You don’t need to be religious, and not even spiritual, to have a god. The moment you see a thing as more than a thing, the moment you attach a sentiment or a meaning beyond its mere function to it, you have created a god. 

I’ve seen many goddesses and gods on my journeys through the East, and some even in the West. I’ve seen their faces, which sometimes looked as astonished as mine, sometimes their features were washed away, some where alive and some were dead, and sometimes it was a stone that was worshipped, a stone onto which someone had painted an eye. 
I’ve met deities in lively churches and dormant temples, in street corners and in museums and in books, and sometimes in the houses of people. I’ve been a guest in houses of gods I’ve never heard of, local deities that only exist in a city, or even only in a single household. I’ve met many strange deities, while others, like the face of Botticelli‘s Venus, always has been as familiar to me as the face of my mother. And somewhere, deep inside of me, I’ve stored all these glances, these faces, these personalities of this enormous family of beings that exist, and don’t exist. They all sleep inside of me now, and sometimes when I make an artwork, they become alive and real again, and I recognize their faces in what I just drew, or sculpted, or painted.

And other people recognize them too. Maybe not as what they were when I saw them, or as what I intended them, or thought that I intended them to be, but as whatever they are meant to be now, and god knows what that is. And if they are meant that they bring a spirit of protection to some household, if they’re picking up that old, honorable godly duty of guarding over something, I’m content with it.

Melmedas – a story from Hormuz Island in the Persian Gulf

Some days ago an Iranian friend told me about Melmedas, a two-tailed mermaid from Hormuz island.

Hormuz Island, a small island in the Persian Gulf, is largely unknown nowadays, but once, it was one of the most important harbors in the middle east and one of the richest trading cities in the world. Hormuz Island was legendary, a well-known metaphor for wealth in the Western world.
The island is small and completely barren – it’s all rocks with a few shrubs here and there. There is no source of water. The sun is hot and white all year round.
Hormuz island still has some treasures: Its colored rocks, a fascinating landscape of deep red, ochre, and blue, which makes it unique in the world and beloved by Iranian artists.

Due to some strange circumstances, a few years ago, I ended up on Hormuz island.

The sun was about to set in Bandar Abbas when I entered the ferry to Hormuz island. It was a small ferry, and there were not many people on it. There was a congregation of bearded Mullahs and a few women wrapped in flowered hijabs, hiding their eyes behind masks that were clearly of African heritage.
Many people who live here are descendants of African slaves. You can sense Africa and India, on their food, in their clothes, in their music.
The South of Iran is a confusing place. I’ve been to many cultural melting pots, but this place, maybe because it is so desolate, so barren, gives you a feeling that is hard to describe. You cannot describe this place as a “melting pot”, because what you see does not feel whole, it feels fragmented.
It somehow makes the needle of your inner compass spin restlessly. You walk through the bazaars, one moment you think you are in India; the next moment you are in Africa. Things feel familiar, but the place as a whole feels infinitely foreign, foreign to itself even. You feel like you are everywhere, and nowhere.

On the ferry, there were some women. We tried to talk, but their English was worse than my Farsi, which already was barely existent. They couldn’t believe that I was alone and kept asking me about my shohare, which means husband in Farsi.

Before I had reached it, I knew that this island was a very improbable place to find myself in.

There was no hotel or restaurant. I was sleeping on a carpet in an empty room next to the ocean and ate in an informal restaurant in the living room of some family. Hormuz Island was a few houses, a small port, and a couple of fishermen on the beach. And the rocks.
There were landscapes of blood-red rocks and metallic beaches with silver sand so hot that you almost couldn't touch it. On the coast, men were carving huge fantastical ships out of wood that seemed out of space and time, and there was a sad Portuguese fort, decayed, displaced, almost gone, infinitely far away in time. Inside, you found a couple of stray dogs.

There was not much more on this strange island.

But now I know that two-tailed mermaids live on this island as well. What fascinates me about the Melmedas is that unlike the Melusina, two-tailed mermaid from Northern Europe, who has spread her tails joyfully in a gesture that feels almost sexual, her tails are folded over each other, which gives her an air of reserve, of prudence, maybe of hostility. They remind me of scissors. Like other female water spirits, embodying lust and danger, the Melmedas favorite pastime is to entice men. They appear in the shape of a beautiful young woman, hiding her two fishtails under the water. Once the man is in her net, turns into an ugly old woman and rips him into pieces with her fishtails.

I wonder what the fishermen from Hormuz would have told me about them.

Seven years

I made my first ceramic sculpture in India, seven years ago. I was at an artist residency in the middle of the jungle of Baroda, working with a group of artist friends. There were cobras who shed their skin in front of our houses before dawn, monkeys who stole our bras, and peacocks who sang their lonely songs from the dark foliage at night.

I remember the studio buildings as stunningly beautiful, giant palaces of red bricks, and I was working in the printmaking studio, which was on top of a hill overlooking the jungle and which you could reach by climbing up a long and steep stairway that seemed endless under the white sun of the tropics.
On the foot of that hill was the ceramics studio, where Deveshi Sahgal, an artist whom I met there and who has become a great friend since, was working on huge sculpture, alone.

I don’t remember much about what clay I used or which glaze or what tools. I have no idea what I did, and that's probably because I had no idea what I did.
I remember Iria Do Castelo, another artist who came down with us to the ceramics studio, creating a precious head at an incredible pace, and told me that later she would cut it off and empty it, both of which amazed me, her working pace and the cutting off.
I, working much much slower, was amazed how my artwork, which was all line and flatness, translated into the third dimension. I have never been able to draw hands, but I learned that I could sculpt them. Also, I was surprised by the realism the third dimension brought to my artwork.

For whatever reason, one of the sculptures I made was a pregnant woman, and someone bought it at our exhibition we later held in New Delhi. Someone with a pregnant friend, I think. The one you see my working on the photo is called “horny woman”, she took me ages to make, and I still have her.
During the following years, traveling around the world, I worked in many printmaking studios, but I did not get in touch which clay again. It just was nowhere to be seen. But it stayed in my head. Not at the forefront, but somewhere in a dark spot in the back of my head.

The seed was sown, and it took seven years to grow.

During these years, I was a person with wings, I flew around a lot, carrying nothing but a sketchbook, and occasionally, some aluminum plates. Light stuff. I ask myself why I only started ceramics last year, and I imagine that maybe, working with ceramics requires some kind of roots. It is heavy, earthy, inert, it needs a lot of space. It needs roots, something which took me a long time to grow.

And so it happened that I started to work in ceramics after I spent a lot of time in my home country in the Austrian Alps. While the pandemic has stirred up the world, it brought a lot of calm to my life. Things have slowed down. I don’t travel as much. If I’ve been a hunter, now I’m more like a fisher. The pond does not move, but it becomes wider and deeper. One year ago, I started to work with clay, this summer I started to work with porcelain.

Ceramics, surprisingly, has a lot in common with printmaking. The suspense, the element of chance, the sense of serendipity. It can be immensely frustrating and it is incredibly satisfying. It can be the best, and it can be the worst (it is a lot like life itself). Another thing printmaking and ceramics have in common is that in these fields, you never stop learning. It is like a cosmos, a cosmos that is vital, fertile, and infinite, you can never fully explore it, and this is the beauty of it. You can walk around it forever and still encounter things that make you wonder, and make your hands feel brand new. I have just begun to walk around in it, and it makes me think of a poem I once wrote on a later stay in India:

Half of the world

When I die
I want to be able to say:
I explored half of this beautiful world
and left the other half
to my beautiful imagination

Photo: A&Y

If you want to see more of this creative India episode, here you can find SAVARI, my sketchbook from that journey

Veils - Notes from the Thar Desert

When we came to the camels‘ watering hole, the herdsman asked you who you were, and when you lifted my green scarf you had wrapped around your face he told you that he had known you as a small child, and pulling the water out from deep under the sand he asked you: Why do you cover your face?

– I’m not used to the sun anymore as I was as a child. I live in the city now and my face can’t be burnt black.

I wandered around these steep, long-legged animals as if they were tree trunks of some dry and ancient forest, and all of a sudden I had the overwhelming feeling that I was a small witness of something earth-old, something that was reaching back so long in history as the names Sirius, Aldebaran and Rigel were tall, something that had been there for thousands of years and had been repeating itself over and over ever since. And for the tiny, but endless circle of a split second I understood there was no such thing as time.

– What is he saying?

– The water is getting less every year. Soon there won’t be camels anymore. People are moving away from here to the city. Because nothing is here.

You show me the house of your grandparents in the distance of the horizon, hidden behind layers and layers of dry fields and thorny shrubs.

In the late afternoon we walk through wide fields of green wheat, lush and unexpected in the desert like an oasis, and under a huge acacia tree we would sit down and become a temporary part of the landscape.

The horizon remains enormous in every direction. And how many stories there are hidden in this leaden, forbidding land, silently waiting, longing to be told, like nests in which birds with colored plumage are hiding, improbable and marvellous in this dry, faded land.

– When my grandfather got married, he did not see the face of my grandmother for months because during the day there were other men and at night there was no light

That story to me was so far away in time, in space, in everything, that it seemed unreal, almost like a myth. But then I remembered how close their house was and that I had just seen it with my own eyes. Did that mean that we were unreal, too?

The last hours of the afternoon bloomed until all of a sudden, dawn approached and erased another day which later I would remember blurry like your face now is for me, veiled by layers of new days of which you were not part anymore.

(Thar Desert, 29. February 2017)

The image shows the artwork “the escapist”, an hand-colored aquatint etching. It is available here

The advantages of being a "woman artist"

Women artists. There is no such thing. It’s just as much a contradiction in terms as ‘man artist’ or ‘elephant artist’. You may be a woman and you may be an artist; but the one is a given and the other is you.

Dorothea Tanning

When I make a series of dinosaurs, nobody asks me why I make only dinosaurs. When I make an exhibition with travel-inspired work, nobody asks me why I didn’t make work inspired by my own country.*
When I make black and white work, nobody asks me about color and vice versa.
But beware, when I make an exhibition full of female figures**, I get asked: Why do you only make women?
This is a weird question. I am a woman. It is perfectly natural to be a woman. It is the human norm. Why shouldn’t I? What’s so special about it?

I’ve seen male artists paint only male figures (or only female figures). I know they don’t get asked the same question. Nobody will notice. I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn't been thinking about this issue. Almost nobody asks why in newspapers, in movies, in children’s books – why literally EVERYWHERE there is a majority of men. Why do men get more, so much more space and time in media, in discussions, everywhere, when they make up less than 50% of us. No. We don’t even notice, because we have been gaslighted, and we continue to gaslight ourselves and others to see women as a minority, and we treat them as such. Although women are the majority.

A woman only drawing women, apparently, it’s too much to take. And especially the kind of women I make, not some sexy girls (where, again, it’s totally ok if it’s only women because these are not really essential women, but women seen through the male gaze, and god beware would we depict men as sex objects) but figures taking up a lot space and which have a lot of presence. These are not figures you can overlook. I understand, although they are not at all meant to be like this, that their energy can unsettle some people.

I can’t stand women being treated as something exotic, something out of the norm. Women are not exotic, we are the human norm. We are more than 50% of humanity and women make up 70% of our ancestors and women have a far greater influence on the genetic make-up of newborns than their respective fathers. Biologically, we are undisputedly the more significant sex, which is probably the reason we ended up in this neurotic patriarchal mess catering to the fragile male ego, men who cannot accept their natural place.

We are supposedly living in an “equal” society. But as a professional and as a creative, unlike the man, I am being defined by my sex first. Only next, I am an artist.

But no, I am not an artist, I am a “woman artist”. Did you ever ask yourself why there exists the term “woman artist”, but not the term “man artist” – and this in a world where the majority of artists are female? It’s ridiculous.

Oh my god, she’s a “woman artist”, how remarkable! Sensational! She does not create just art, she makes “female art”, “woman art” (whatever that is), she needs to be “empowered” and “celebrated” when all this “empowering” and “celebrating” women contributes to exoticize and infantilize us. Women are not weak creatures who need “help” to walk their path, we simply need society to stop putting stones in our way. But our way is full of stones.

We need the same chances and we don’t have them.

I often point it out to the persons responsible when women are discriminated und underrepresented in panels, discussions, and exhibitions everywhere, I point it out politely because even if I have all the right to be angry, the truth is women don’t have the right to be angry about this in our society. Anger would harm the cause, at least in this case. So I patiently explain to them what unconscious bias is. I tell them that we all have it. I ask them politely to think about women next time, to give them the same chances as men.

The answer I get is always disappointing. It’s always “just a coincidence”. There are, regularly, three or more times more men than women, but yeah, it’s always just a “coincidence”. Or I get no answer at all.

The saddest thing is, women get discriminated against by both women and men.

A few exhibitions that pretend to be “feminist” because a capitalist, pretty, and pretty toothless version of feminism has become some sort of a trend now, are not helping any female artist when this discrimination (“coincidence”) we face is denied and has absolutely no consequences when the rest of the time (and if you don’t believe this, because it’s so unbelievable, there are studies proving it) we have to work much harder than men for the same success and to survive, and when our work is bought less often and for lower prices and is regarded inferior to men’s work just because we are women.

______________________

* But the question I get asked most is “how is it as a woman in this country”, because of all the stories I have to tell, the stories of me being disrespected because of my sex apparently are the most interesting ones to people, bravo.

**In said exhibition there were also a few male figures. But as we know from scientific studies, where women take up only half of the space (just as it is their right) they are already perceived as the majority, as “too much"

Burning island

In nature, green is not a color, green burns everywhere
(Blanca Wiethüchter)

You woke up for a Sunday like all the other Sundays on the peninsula, a Sunday that was like its sky, vast and greyish, a Sunday that only belongs to you, where you stroll around all day near the ocean and at sunset disappear with a book into one of the old bars in the Casco Viejo and have a glass of wine and a piece of tortilla and forget everything around you until the darkness fills the old streets and reminds you that no Sunday is eternal. 

But this Sunday has just been born, and it belongs to you.

You live only a few steps away from the sea. On this day, as you step out, the sky and the ocean are enormous, you walk between them, there is nobody else in this great nothing, just some ships far away. 

You walk on a mural near Praia das Lapas, the small beach between the Aquarium and the Tower of Hercules, thinking that you are too old to walk on murals, thinking that you are never too old to walk on murals, when you notice it: You notice that the grey of the sky is not the same grey as usual, that it has a strange orange hue. Why do you feel so hot on this October day?
You think of these enormous Sahara storms that every couple of years carry sand up until the Alps and soak the country in an intense foreign hue of orange, when for a few days, the Alps share their sky with Africa. 

Later, at night, some friends invite you to the cinema next to the port. You watch Suspiria, terrifying and beautiful. And then, when you step out of the cinema, it rains ashes on your heads. The sky is completely black now, there are no stars, and the sailboats in the port are softly clanking, just as every night. What is happening? 

You didn’t know? your friends ask, you didn’t hear about the fire? 

You go have some beers in a bar in the Casco Viejo, sitting outside between the trees, and thick chunks of ashes fall on your arms from the sky. You hold them in your hand, you weigh their fragile shape and ask yourself what they once might have been – a leaf, a branch, a log from a house? 

As you step inside the bar, you see the television blazing in a corner. There is a map of Galicia, ocean and forests, spangled with little orange fire pictograms. It looks beautiful and scary. On the map, you find yourself on an island between fire and water. 

You remember your orange morning, and you realize that you did not first learn about this fire from your friends, nor from television: You knew it before, you experienced it from afar. You never saw that fire, but there, by the ocean, you felt it in your bones. Your skin felt the sky that was burning far away, and what the fire had eaten was raining onto you. Your body knew before you knew.

Only a few times in life we get grazed by the notion of being an animal, for one second, a few times in a lifetime, sometimes, when you break through the margins of the parallel world that humans have created for themselves, that synthetic world of safety on whose margins natural disasters, horrible accidents and the improbabilities of statistics are waiting.

It can happen when you get lost in a Canyon in an Arabian desert, or above the Atlantic ocean when turbulence wakes you in the plane at night, or when a thunderstorm surprises you when you reach the top of a mountain late in the day, or when you’re on a small boat and loose sight of the shore. 

It happens when you are exposed to the elements and you realize that you are an element as well, nothing but. When you, for a moment, lose hold the thread of Ariadne which, you like to believe, leads you through the labyrinth of life, that succession of events, because you are an inhabitant of the world of statistics and probabilities, of regulations and insurances, the walls are made of stone, you can’t fall out of the frame, but you didn’t know there were abysses in the labyrinth, but yes, there are, and you fall and you realize that you’ve always been falling, that you can’t cling on that thread. Your hands are empty now, something is burning on your mind, and now, now you are an animal. 

If you have been living the life of a metaphor, the life of cities and streets, now you are real. Now you have been given birth to, in another world, the world beyond good and bad, the world that is. A world that seems harsh and cruel to you, a world of injustice, but really it is a world of justice. 

For some people, this falling becomes the moment of their death. Other ones almost die. And some just feel for the first time the fragility, and with it, the preciousness, of their lives.  But all of us, before we die, we become an animal, we learn what it means to be an animal. 

We might have led a life of lies, but we all become real before we die.

You slip back on our human dress, you go back to our house, to your bed and sleep, you sleep while the flames stand high around you. You know that someone will take care of you, because as opposed to the animal, who knows what it knows, you have a belief: humans have the fire brigade, and they have god, and this is our great comfort, even though – and we like to forget this – these two entities sometimes do seem to have opposite intentions. 

I slept well during these days of the fire, but something in me did not. It was the animal inside me, locked between water and fire, that stayed awake all night to sniff the burnt air and to be alive, while I was asleep elsewhere. In the middle of the city, without leaving it, you are thrown out of the city and thrown into a forest, a burning one. 

I still sometimes dream of that night where I became animal, and of that burning forests that I later stepped into, and they were green again, they smelled like life, but everything that smells like life smells like death, too, and now the flowers and the trees have become more fragile and more precious, because you know that these flowers that bloom can wither slowly or burn fast. 

Image: Lanzallamas (flamethrower) aquatint etching. Available here

The other caravan

When my grandfather died, he left me an old travel guide called "The Soviet Orient", a thick book full of black and white photos of the most wonderful buildings – mosques, shrines, and minarets of a kind that I had never seen before. I was fascinated by them – and I knew that I had to go to this marvelous place that did not only seem far away in space, but also in time. And then, a few years later I traveled to see the architectural beauty of the former "Soviet Orient". I traveled to Uzbekistan.

I traveled through this hypnotic country for many weeks, moving slowly and at times like in a dream under the hot, heavy September sun, spending endless hours drawing and writing in the cool shade of stunningly beautiful mosques, shrines, and caravanserais, climbing up minarets, and sitting with the market women of the great bazaars, them selling vegetables and fabric, me drawing next to them.  

Seven days I spent in the legendary city of Samarkand, the most important city on the silk road, and a place where East and West met for thousands of years, where caravans pass through from all cardinal directions. I've always been intrigued by the idea of caravans, of travelers carrying treasures and stories, goods tangible and intangible, from the East to the West, and from the West to the East, the infinite deserts, great empty spaces they move through, and the caravanserais, where people from all over the world would meet, taking breaks along their long and tiresome journeys. 

The animals of the caravans were camels and horses, carrying goods like spices, silk, gold, and tea. Alongside them, I like to imagine another caravan, a caravan of fantastic animals traveling from the East to the West, paralleling the caravan of camels and horses in the hot sand like a mirage. The other caravan does not carry silk or gold, but stories, the material of dreams interweaved in flying carpets, memories of places that only exist in someone’s fantasy, tales of undiscovered stars and unknown flowers, and prayers of far deities, all things that we can’t touch, but which touch us, at a place in our heart we didn’t know existed, until it begins to stir in answer to this call in a foreign language we all of a sudden understand.

The other caravan never arrives: It’s moving in circles, like a planet, like the seasons, like a holy or an unholy book, that is read and re-read over and over, like water, which rains down on the earth and ascends again to the clouds, but also seeps away under ground just to blossom out again in bright oases.

The other caravan is richly loaded: It brings us all the fantasy that an unknown land can be for another. 

________________________

This animal is is my first one of this fantastic caravan. Maybe, hopefully, more will follow, and then I’d love them to travel all over the world, in all directions. 

My lover is waiting behind the door: The poetry that annoys the Taliban

(für den deutschen Text nach unten scrollen)

In 2018, I visited Pakistan for the first time. Arriving with a broken hand in a cast and not being able to paint, I concentrated on collecting stories. I was so fascinated with the storytelling culture I encountered there that I decided to return the following year. This time, I was invited to stay with a couple in Lahore, well-known intellectuals and both of them well beyond the age of retirement, but still working relentlessly, spending entire days out of the house, engaged in all sorts of cultural, artistic, and development work all over Pakistan.

On most days, they would only appear late at night, when we would meet around the kitchen table for dinner, delicious dishes served by their delightful maid with whom I could only communicate with wild gestures and smiles, and who I’m sure would also have had a lot of stories to tell, would we have had a common language to communicate with each other.
It was during these nights that the old couple told me the most fascinating stories about Pakistan, some of which were funny, some of which were sad – most of them were funny and tragic at the same time. So at night, I would listen to their stories, while I spent the mornings on the the rooftop, painting artworks inspired by these stories.
One of the most fascinating stories they told me was the story of Dappa.

Dappa is the secret and defiant oral poetry of Pakhtun women in Afghanistan and West Pakistan. It is practiced during daily tasks such as fetching water from the well and which (both women leaving the house for whatever task and practicing poetry) naturally did not delight the Taliban.

Some examples of Dappa are: You’re talking about the honor of your daughter, until the money jingles in your pocket, or When will you leave the house, old man, my lover is already waiting behind the door to kiss my rosy cheeks. 

In one village, a Western NGO decided to “improve” the life of the people and install running water in each household. The result was that the women had no reason to go out anymore and had to stay at home (because god beware a woman walking around only for her own enjoyment), which naturally pleased the Taliban, but not the women, who complained with the NGO: You thought you were improving our lives, but you have destroyed our culture.

But there is a somewhat happy ending to the story of the women of this village: They found another place, where they could, undisturbed by the Taliban and other men, practice Dappa. 

This and similar stories from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa I was told last year in Pakistan, where I made a series of paintings inspired by my stay, including this one. It’s a woman in traditional clothes with water pitchers painted with symbols alluding to themes of Dappa poetry. The word Dappa itself is an onomatopoeia, coming from the sound of the waterpots being rhythmically beaten to accompany the spoken word.

It is very dangerous to travel to KP, there is a lot of terrorism, and the risk of being kidnapped is extremely high for foreigners. In fall 2020, I would have had a safe opportunity to travel to KP and to collect Dappa verses, which I was extremely excited about. But then, the pandemic happened and I couldn’t go.

One day, roaming in the poetry section of a Muslim bookstore in Singapore, to my great delight, I discovered a little treasure called Songs of Love and War – a wonderful collection of Dappa verse gathered by an Afghan scholar and poet named Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, who was assassinated in Peshawar in the 80ies.

In Lahore, I had only heard poems about love – funny, tender and, given the cruel circumstances female life is subjected to in Pakhtun culture, deeply tragic. Majrouh collected poems from war refugees in refugee camps in Afghanistan. The Pakhtun people always have been warriors: The different tribes are always engaged in war, and this culture of violence obviously does not stop at the house door. Also in these circumstances that make every woman double victim, both of war and of domestic violence, she keeps her defiance, cleverly turning the tradition of the glorification of male violence against himself: Man, if you don’t win this war, don’t even bother come back home.

Her words become her weapons, they are her only weapons. This is the power of poetry, which is manifold and which here becomes a means of survival, a way to speak and live a woman’s truth, of retaining her dignity and sanity in a world of brutal and senseless male oppression and violence.
The water hole and the poetry that is practiced there becomes an oasis in a wasteland: Where there is poetry, there is hope. There exist thousands and thousands of these oases, in which a world that is not allowed to exist, but which has to exist, is created, recreated, through language – or rather, preserved.
Because it is not a new world that is described here, it is a world that has always existed, and always will, even though nowadays it’s an invisible world, hidden behind veils. 
This world is the foundation of human existence, essential and precious, it’s the fertile soil underneath the stage on which the shadow theatre, that great drama, the tragicomedy of the male rule is being played. 
And even though this hidden world is already and always present – in the oasis sleeps a great future. Its time, which will mean flourishing and revelation, has not come yet, but it will come. In the meantime, it’s blooming in the oases of hope, where it is being spelled out over and over, being evoked in the rhythm of the clapping of the hands, in the slower rhythm of the fetching of water, and finally in the great, all-embracing rhythm which underlies One day, the great drama of men, which feels like our past and our present and our future, but actually is nothing but a dark pause between two beats of the great drum, will end, the source of water will break open and flow into the desert, and flowers will bloom. 

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Mein Liebhaber wartet hinter der Tür: Gedichte, die die Taliban ärgern

Dappa ist die geheime, aufsässige Dichtkunst der Paschtuninnen in Pakistan und Afghanistan, die beim alltäglichen Wasserholen, eine der wenigen Tätigkeiten, für die Frauen das Haus verlassen dürfen, praktiziert wird und welche die Taliban naturgemäß wenig erfreut. Beispiel: Du redest von der Ehre deiner Tochter, bis das Geld in deinen Taschen klingelt. Oder: Wann gehst du endlich aus dem Haus, Alter, mein Liebhaber wartet bereits hinter der Tür, um mich auf meine rosigen Wangen zu küssen.

In einem Dorf kam es zu einer so unglücklichen wie unfreiwilligen Allianz einer westlichen NGO mit den Taliban, als erste beschloss, das Leben der Menschen zu “verbessern” und jedes Haus mit fließendem Wasser zu versorgen. Die tragische Nebenwirkung dieser Maßnahmen war, dass die Frauen keinen Grund mehr hatten, außer Haus zu gehen, und nun zuhause bei ihren Wasserhähnen bleiben mussten.

Die Taliban freuten diese Umstände naturgemäß, die Frauen weniger, und die NGO musste Schimpf und Schande über sich ergehen lassen: Ihr habt unsere Kultur zerstört! 

Die Geschichte dieses Dorfes ging noch halbwegs gut aus, und die Frauen fanden letztendlich einen anderen Ort, wo sie ungestört von den Taliban und anderen Männern Dappa praktizieren konnten. 

Diese und ähnliche Geschichten aus Khyber Pakhtunkhwa erzählte man mir letztes Jahr in Pakistan, wo ich dieses und andere Bilder, inspiriert von Geschichten aus Pakistan malte. Dieses Bild zeigt eine Frau in traditioneller Kleidung, auf ihrem Kopf stapeln sich die Wassertöpfe, die mit Symbolen bemalt sind, die an die Themen von Dappa hinweisen. Das Wort Dappa selber ist eine lautmalerische Nachbildung des mit den Händen auf die Wassertöpfe Schlagens, mit dem das gesprochene Wort mit Rhythmus unterlegt wird.

Letzten Herbst hätte sich mir sogar eine Möglichkeit eröffnet, mit einer Delegation in relativ sicherem Rahmen nach Khyber Pakhtunkhwa zu reisen (denn einfach so kann – oder will – man da nicht hin: Das Entführungsrisiko für AusländerInnen ist extrem hoch) und Dappa-Verse zu sammeln, ein Vorhaben, das leider durch die Pandemie verunmöglicht wurde.

Im Frühjahr 2020, kurz vor dem Ausbruch der Pandemie, fiel mir in der Lyrikabteilung einer muslimischen Buchhandlung in Singapur das Buch Songs of Love and War in die Hände – eine wunderbare Sammlung von Dappa-Versen eines afghanischen Gelehrten und Dichter namens Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, der in den Achtziger Jahren nach Peshawar, eine Grenzstadt zwischen Pakistan und Afghanistan, ins Exil ging und dort ermordet wurde. Die Gedichte, die man mir in Lahore erzählte, handelten von der Liebe, waren lustig, liebevoll, oft auch – angesichts der Umstände, unter denen paschtunische Frauen leben müssen – tragisch. Majrouh hingegen, sebst Paschtune, sammelte seine Gedichte in afghanischen Flüchtlingslagern. Die Paschtunen sind kriegerische Stämme, ihre Kultur ist seit jeher von Gewalt und Krieg geprägt. Die von Majrouh gesammelten Texte zeigen, neben der Lust und der Liebe, noch ein anderes, gewalttätige Gesicht einer Stammeskultur, die sich seit Jahrhunderten und Jahrtausenden in einem unaufhörlichen Krieg befindet, ein Krieg, der, naturgemäß, vor der eigenen Haustür nicht halt macht und stets als Dritter zwischen der Beziehung von Frau und Mann steht: Mann! Wenn du diesen Kampf verlierst, brauchst du gar nicht mehr nach Hause kommen.

Dieser Vers ist mir im Kopf geblieben: Er zeigt, dass selbst unter diesen Umständen, die die Frau zum doppelten Opfer der Gewalt machen, der sie als Frau sowohl drinnen und draußen ausgesetzt ist, sie im Geiste aufsässig bleibt und die Poesie dazu verwendet, die unheilbringende Tradition der Verherrlichung männlicher Gewalt und die Logik des Krieges, den er führt, gegen den Mann selbst zu richten. Er zeigt wohl aber auch, dass sie – wie könnte es anders sein – selbst in Logik des Krieges und der Gewalt gefangen ist.

Die Waffen einer Frau ist die Dichtung, das Wort – es sind ihre einzigen Waffen in diesem Krieg. Und hier zeigt sich die Macht der Poesie, die hier zu einer Überlebensstrategie wird. Die Dichtung bietet einen Raum, in dem eine Frau – gemeinsam mit anderen Frauen – ihre Wahrheit aussprechen, leben und sich ihrer immer wieder vergewissern kann, in der sie sein kann, was sie ist: Die Poesie ist die einzige Möglichkeit, ihre Würde und Eigenständigkeit gegenüber dem Mann, und sei es nur in ihrem Innersten, zu bewahren und so ihren Verstand nicht zu verlieren in einer Welt der brutalen und sinnlosen männlichen Unterdrückung und Gewalt.

Das Dichten an der Wasserstelle wird zu einer Oase in einer wüsten Welt: Wo gedichtet wird, gibt es Hoffnung. Abertausende gibt es von diesen Oasen, in denen eine Welt, die nicht existieren darf, aber existieren muss, durch Sprache geschaffen, oder vielmehr bewahrt wird. Denn es ist keinen neue Welt, die da beschrieben wird, sie hat immer schon existiert, wenn auch heute heimlich und unsichtbar, hinter Schleiern. Sie ist die notwendige Grundlage allen menschlichen Seins, das Essentielle, die fruchtbare Erde unter der wackeligen Bühne, auf dem das Schattentheater, die großen Inszenierung, die Tragikomödie der Männerherrschaft gespielt wird. Und trotz ihrer Allgegenwärtigkeit schläft in ihr auch eine große Zukunft: Ihre Zeit, die Blüte und Offenbarung bedeuten wird, ist noch nicht gekommen, aber sie wird kommen. In der Zwischenzeit blüht sie in den Oasen der Hoffnung, wo sie beschrieben wird und ausgesprochen, wo sie immer wieder evoziert wird, im schnellen Rhythmus der Worte und dem Klatschen der Hände, im langsameren Rhythmus des Wasserholens und schließlich im größten, allumfassenden Rhythmus, der alles bestimmt: Eines Tages wird die große Inszenierung der Männer, die gefühlt ewig dauert, aber in Wahrheit nichts anderes ist als die Pause zwischen zwei Trommelschlägen, enden, die Wasserquelle wird aufbrechen und ungehindert in die Wüste fließen, und die Blumen werden wieder blühen.

The Venice of the East: Mapping a surreal place

Lake City is a three meters long leporello drawing I made during a two months long stay in the city of Udaipur in Rajasthan, India. Udaipur, also called Lake City and known as the “Venice of the East”, is considered one of the most beautiful cities of India. It is a fairytale city full of gorgeous palaces, a labyrinth of lakes and bridges and millions of intricate alleyways leading to mysterious temples. For me it was a wonderland I loved to explore, mostly with my bike.

My illustrated book, Lake City, was created while exploring and directly drawn in the streets of Udaipur over many, many hours. It is a multi-spatial tour through the city and documents things seen, experienced, memorized and fantasized in this surreal city. For those who don’t know Udaipur, the drawing might appear to depict a completely imaginary place, but the drawing is an attempt to capture the overwhelmingly surreal nature and magical beauty of a city with its people, gods and animals.

My drawing blurs the line between imagination and reality, reproducing the feeling one gets while strolling through Udaipur. Palaces swimming on lakes, goddesses showing their tongues, women floating on the water riding on swans and horses disguised as baby elephants – all these are images found in Udaipur and have become part of my fantastical portrait of the spirit of the city.

Below you can read some of the stories behind the drawings of the book:

The lakes

Gangaur Ghat is the main ghat (a square with steps leading down to the water) of Udaipur.
It is in the heart of the city and one of my favourite places to draw, and in this scene you can see me sitting and drawing myself in the arcades on the left (you can spot my bike in another arcade). Gangaur Ghat is a popular meeting place for people to have a cup of chai and enjoy the beautiful view across Lake Pichola. Being a foreigner everybody wanted to talk to me and I had lots of fun encounters there – but sometimes I had to wear my earphones in order to be able to draw without being interrupted every five minutes, otherwise I think I would still be sitting there trying to finish my drawing.

The palaces

Udaipur is famous for its beautiful white palaces on the waterfront and some even floating in the middle of the lakes. The palaces in my drawing are inspired by these palaces but also consist of a patchwork of different architectural details and other things and scenes found in the city. This palace, for example, contains shrines with different deities, the door of the blue house mentioned below in the story about the prince, and the portrait of a lovely woman from the old town whose child I drew on the street and who invited me into her kitchen to have a cup of chai with her.

The goddess riding on the swan is an image I found in a small temple hidden near Hathipol Road. I remember sitting there and writing in my sketchbook for some time, when the temple guardian emerged, came up to me and told me the most beautiful words I had ever heard in a house of god: “The temple is a centre of peace and pleasure. You can sit here in peace and think of the god you believe in“.

The prince

During one of my bike tours through the old town one day, I discovered a very beautiful blue house and stopped to marvel at it. The owner of the house, Prem, invited me inside for some tea and took me to a ritual at one of the neighbour‘s house. That family worshipped a long gone Udaipur prince, Sagas Ji (whose eternally surprised glance you meet in the little shrine next to the black door), like a god in a little shrine next to the entrance of their house, and in turn Sagas Ji would protect their house and family.

While the sun was slowly setting, we, together with the children from the neighbourhood, witnessed the puja, a ritual of worship involving lots of flowers, ringing bells, rose water, cow pee and water from the Ganges.

The solar observatory

The solar observatory, lonely like an abandoned island in the middle of Fateh Sagar Lake, is one of the most spectacular views. One of my most beautiful memories is of one night when I was on my way back from a wedding in the hills. I was riding a motorbike through the pitch black forest and then all of a sudden emerged between the two lakes into a dreamlike scenery of breathtaking beauty and great peace. There was nothing under the dark sky but stars and silence and the white solar observatory in the middle of the black lake, other-worldly like a spaceship floating in its own universe.

The bridge and the temple

Udaipur foot bridge across Lake Pichola connects the old town with Ambamata district. Near the bridge you find Jagdish Temple, the biggest and busiest temple in Udaipur. I used to go there to draw or write quite often, meeting all kinds of people there – for example Neha, a beautiful, dolled-up girl who had come all the way from Jaipur to consult the goddess Ma Durga about her love life and who then after visiting Ma Durga’s shrine also sought some advice from me; a funny old man who snatched my notebook from my hands and checked it in the same manner an inspector would check the validity of a bus ticket, approving my indecipherable with a sharp nod); and a very friendly policeman who, after he had done his prayer in full uniform except his shoes, gave some bills to a beggar and some candy to me.

Udaipur City Palace

This part of the drawing depicts the famous city palace where once the Maharanas of Mewar lived. It is an enormous and fascinating palace build and expanded over a period of almost 400 years, and I spent many days drawing it and exploring it. My favourite detail of this part is the horse with the elephant trunk – the Maharanas used to dress their horses with artificial elephant trunks in war so the elephants of their enemies would believe them to be baby elephants and would not attack them.

You can order Lake City here in my shop

The arrival of the Buraq

Sometimes there are things that come to us, from the outside or the inside, and stay with us for some time – in some cases forever. Thoughts, words, sounds, stories, creatures. They occupy us and our thoughts; they become the horses we ride in our dreams. In my case, it is the winged horse that I have been riding for some time: The Buraq. 

I remember where it came from – I saw it on a painted tray in the dining room of a house in Lahore. It was a primitive painting, painted with primary colors – bright red, yellow, green – in the style of Pakistani truck art, which itself is a universe to explore.

There it was, flying in a deep indigo sky spangled with delicate, transparent white stars, each brushstroke a ray of light, there it was, the beautiful Buraq, with its horse body decorated with golden jewelry, with its impossible wings and a dreamy face, flying forever in the square sky on the tray. It was marvelous. 

This is how I found the Buraq*, this mystical creature on whose back the prophet Mohamed rode through the skies to the Al Aqsa Mosque** in Jerusalem on what is known as the Night Journey.

I’ve seen the most precious miniature paintings in the galleries of the Lahore Museum, noble women flying kites under the stars in nights long gone, Hindu warriors fighting colorful and intricate wars against spiritual beasts, medieval princesses and princes mesmerized by early fireworks, I’ve seen the archaic smiles of the first Buddhas in Peshawar and in an antique shop in Islamabad I fell for a tiny portrait of Mumtaz Mahal painted on an oval piece of ivory – but the Buraq stood out of all the treasures.

I was so fascinated by it that later I commissioned a Buraq tray for myself in the same workshop, where a group of men painted all sorts of objects with dazzling and narcotic-smelling colors, and when they gave it to me after a week, we all noticed that the painter had given the Buraq my face – which was curious because the painter and I had never met. 

So I know where the Buraq came from. But still sometimes I ask myself why it stays with me and makes me paint it over and over. Where does it carry me? As clear as it is that these images want to tell us something, as unclear is the language in which the images are speaking to us, a language which, the more we try to grasp it with the clarity of language, withdraws into the nebulous, the unseizable. But unseizable does not mean incomprehensible.

Still, it’s hard to tell what they want to tell us. Some are too blunt not to be placed, and I also like these. Others reveal themselves in retrospect only, when all falls into place. And sometimes, other people see things in my artworks that I cannot see, because I am too close to them. And sometimes one simply enjoys this wandering wondering, where arrival is not a category, just like it isn’t a category in a dance.

Some things don’t want to be understood; they exist is beyond the duality of question and answer. And so, the Buraq remains part of a family of things that have a meaning not in the sense of something to be understood rationally, but to be felt, like music, which is a language we understand in a way that makes our concept of “understanding” obsolete. There are some things the head doesn’t know, but the heart knows. It’s a meaning that is talking to a part of our being whose beauty lies in its evasiveness and its darkness. It is hard, impossible to capture, and it is not supposed to be captured – just like a winged horse. 

The Buraq aquatint etching is available here.

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*Its name is etymologically linked to Arabic barq, meaning “light”, “bright”, or “emitting light” or the Middle Persian barag, “riding beast”.
** Also called the far mosque, about whose spiritual nature Rumi has written a beautiful poem

Travel sketchbooks: Capturing ephemeral countries

This is a portrait of my fellow artist Barbora. I met her in the North East of India, and for one month we shared a room in the jungle-covered hills of Meghalaya, where explored the fascinating culture of the Khasi together and became friends.

When I met her, I was immediately intrigued by her enthusiasm – she had just arrived from a long and complicated journey from Finland but instead of being exhausted, she seemed to burst with energy. Her eyes were beaming as she told us that she had, god knows how, managed to ride on an elephant on the way from Guwahati airport up to the hill, five hours on a bumpy dirt road, which was exhausting enough alone. 

I admired her way of seeing the world, her refreshing personality, which was a charming combination of straightforwardness and tenderness, and I was particularly fascinated by the instant and special connection she had with the Khasi, and I documented a part of her very special story in my book "Meghalaya".

I like to explore countries, cultures, and communities with my sketchbooks, but as much as they are travel books, they are also personal diaries. As much as I am interested in learning a lot about a culture and trying to tell stories about it, for me it is equally important to tell about the context in which I travel and tell about the things that happen in and around me: I am interested uniqueness of the moment. Sometimes I like to compare myself to a sponge, absorbing it all, and I also like to let myself carry away into all sorts of different directions - for example, my Meghalaya book is full of stories not only about Meghalaya, but also contains lots of stories about Assam, because that particular Meghalayan microcosmos I visited was inhabited by an Assamese storyteller whose beautiful stories for me became an important part of the experience. I like that sort of eclecticism because this is just how the world is, chaotic and marvelous. 

My travel sketchbook is not only about observations, but also about relationships, and a fellow traveler at some point becomes as much part of the place as a native – places express themselves through the people who live there, but also through the ones who travel through, and the story that develops between them, like the story of Barbora and Arrowstar, a young archer and soldier from the Khasi hills. 

I hold the pen in my hands, but what speaks in my sketchbooks is not only my voice, but the voice of many. I like it to be a place where everything can be object and everything can be subject. On the same page, you might read things I hear and other things I think in my head, and you might not even be able to tell whose story I’m telling. The story I’m telling is not linear, it’s associative, it’s fragmental, and whatever information is missing is filled out effortlessly by your fantasy: The drawing of Barbora reaching up to the blossoms of a tree and telling me “my heart is too big” only hints the love story that unfolds on a subsequent page. We don’t need to know everything, because sometimes, and especially when it comes to traveling, imagination is more delicious than knowledge. 

Imagine you’re wandering through an exotic market and there this mix of noises and images, you pick up snatches of conversations here and there and you smell things and you see things and there are so many impressions that they start to become blurred: This is the sensation I like to convey, not just this is this and that is that, but something of a more multidimensional, intangible nature, a bit like the way our perception and memory works. 

I am not an observer, I am what happens at a certain place at a certain moment, and it is precisely this experience that I like to capture – or to approach, because it is impossible to capture. And what we call “country” or “city” is a construct that only exists at that moment you step into it – while you believe you exist in it, it exists in you, and only exists in you. It is an experience, it is completely fluid, it is but it is many countries and many cities overlapping, you can’t tell where one begins and the other ends: A place, a country, a city is something that is made of moments, it is ephemeral, and in my sketchbook, I want to convey that taste of this ephemeral, precious place that only exists for a moment, with its voices, faces, stories, patterns. This place that only exists once and then never again. 

This book is the home of a country called Meghalaya that only exists between the pages of the book, the Meghalaya of Barbora and the Assamese storyteller and many others, humans, and spirits, who for a short while, or for an eternity, live between the magic mountains and enchanted forests of Meghalaya: This is a country that ends with the last page. And starts to live again somewhere else, as something else. 

My book Meghalaya is available here.
And this is Barbora.

Forbidden trees and nameless flowers

It’s the first of May, and you have a coffee on the square and then go for a walk into the forest. It is already late, four o’clock. 
You step into the forest and into the fragrance of the eucalyptus that welcomes you like a hug from a loved one. You breathe in, but it feels like breathing out.
You love the eucalyptus, but you also feel a bit guilty about it. Because you know it’s a bad tree, a tree that causes wildfires. But how can a tree be bad. It’s just a migrant, like you. And it’s just living its truth, like you do. Like you try to do. 

The fern that seams the forest path now stands so high that it almost reaches your collarbone. You walk up Talai and across the hills to Armea. You love the sound of these places almost as much as you love the smell of the eucalyptus trees. You walk through Talai and Armea, and one part of the enjoyment of going there is their beautiful names and to have the occasion to think them, to say them, to feel them, to live them, now I am in Talai, now I am in Armea. Talai and Armea, in the hills, silent houses with shut windows and empty flower gardens here and there, and vegetable gardens where sometimes you meet an old woman bent under the sun, and always, at some point, like an explosion, the hysterical bark of an invisible dog behind a fence that one day, you are sure, will give you a heart attack. 

One path, a secret path right through the forest, has become overgrown, and you can’t walk there anymore. It’s a path you remember well, and also with whom you walked there, seven years ago, in those nights where the forest was a dark book full of ephemeral and precious moments, where you watched the shooting stars above the trees and saw the fox flashing through the thicket and where you ripped your favorite silk dress in the thorns of the blackberry bushes and you didn’t care. 

You walk down San Xiao. You know that this means Saint Julian in Galego, but you also know that it must mean something in Chinese. You become curious, and you look it up, it means lots of things, but it means nothing to you and your green hills. 
On the way, you collect a bouquet of wild mint, forget me not, and other flowers whose names you don’t know. You plan to look their names up, you always plan it. But you never do it. One part of you wants to know everything, but there is another part of you that finds pleasure in being surrounded by nameless things. 

The forest ends for you where you encounter the first people, and you put your mask back on. A few corners later, there are drunkards, drunken men without masks, screaming across the street. It’s the first of May, and it’s Saturday, and the bars and cafes are crammed with people. It’s seven now, and people are having their party night early, while the sun is still high, because at nine, all bars have to close.  

You go home because that’s what you do when you are tired. You replace the withering bouquet on the wooden chest with today’s flowers. You realize that every day, your home becomes more forest, more meadow, more mountain.

The wreath of laurel and mimosa in your living room, the white flowers in your bathroom, the perfect little eucalyptus wreath above your bed, a gift from the friend who taught you how to wind wreaths. You look out of the window, where you see the grey walls of the inner courtyard. 

You want to go outside again – 

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Ser Silvestre is a miniature etching inspired by the forests of Galicia. it is part of the series The Far Province, inspired by Galician mythology. It is available in my shop.

How things come to their names: The interplay of images and words

Giving a title to an artwork always is a special delight for me. The best titles are the ones that are like the last brushstroke on the drawing, that finish it and complete it. I like titles that are so strong that once it is given, the image would feel naked without it, not the same. I like it when they add an extra narrative layer to it, when title and image become an intertwined unity: When they become one.
Some titles come to me while drawing, some come before drawing, some come never at all (I don’t feel like all artworks need a title) and some never fit the artwork.
And sometimes, I love the title more than the artwork. Sometimes I even feel the urge to create an image for an evocative word or phrase that I can’t get out of my head and that wants to be expressed as an image.
Sometimes I read something somewhere and carry it around with me and at some point, I must make an artwork for it, like for “The Golden Road to Samarkand”, which is the title of a poem by James Elroy) or “The disobedient children of Lahore”, an image that rose while reading a small ad in a Lahori newspaper by a Pakistani father disowning his children for being disobedient, or “Blühn and Verwehn”* a line from a saying that children keep telling to each other in one of my favorite fairy tales, Andersen’s Snow Queen, a saying which they only understand at the end of the fairy tale, when they are adults and which also myself didn’t understand as a child but despite that, or actually because of that, fascinated me and stuck in my head until I was an adult and like the characters of the fairy tale, understood what the words meant.
There is something so satisfying about finally being able to write these beloved words under an image I feel there could belong. For me, words and images are not from two different worlds, they can’t be, because my words always long for images and my images always long for words.
This image is a miniature aquatint etching and it is called “Aisha and her horse are not on speaking terms”. In this case, the title came after or during the image, and this is definitely one of my favourite titles – the artwork would not be the same with it.
The irony of it all is that the title does not even fit onto the artwork because it is so small, so it just says “Aisha” (but I write it on the back). It was the first, but not the last time I drew someone sitting backwards on an animal, the image just came to me like later its title.

Aisha and her horse are not on speaking terms is available in my shop in three hand-colored versions.

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*Rosen, sie blühn und verwehn, wir werden das Christkindlein sehn (Roses, they bloom and they wither, one day we will see baby Jesus).

Countermagic

Countermagic

1. Countermagic is the name of this etching and also of the album by Nym I’ve been listening to up and down last week while working on this and other etchings. I hadn’t heard this marvellous, strangely satisfying word for a while and I still keep turning it around in my head. Aside from witch tales, the term “magic” now is mostly (and I’m also guilty of that) used and possibly misused to describe something wonderful.
When I was a child, I did not associate the term magic first with something wonderful (it was that scary element which made the word fascinating), as an adult, I definitely do. Now, when something is called “magic”, we know it must be amazing and we generally don’t associate it with something scary. It has lost its ambiguity to an extend that now it’s even used to sell things.
And so I like how the term countermagic breaks and expands this narrow meaning of “magic” how we use it today and brings it back to its full force and its wholeness, which contains good but also evil, light but also darkness. And funnily enough, in this sense, the term “countermagic” becomes countermagic to the term “magic” in the sense of the narrowed concept the latter has become.

2. A while ago in the little Spanish village I live I was waiting for the traffic light to turn green and on the other side of the street there was an old lady waiting. She was holding two terriers on a leash, one standing in front of the other and blocking my view to the second one until that one stuck out his head, so that from my perspective for a short (and magic, here we go!) moment it looked like a two-headed terrier, and that was the inspiration for that two-headed creature in this etching.

Countermagic is available in my shop

The story of the flower thief

The flower thief is a story from Castagno di Pitecchio, a little village in the hills of Tuscany.
I was invited there as an artist there and on the way up to the village through the beautiful Tuscan chestnut forests and olive groves, I told the organizer of the artist residency that I was collecting stories. I hope you find some, she said, this village is an old people’s home.
Then she told me about the ladro di legna, the wood thief. It was not a story, she just told me of his existence: A guy who lives in this village and who steals firewood from other people. I needed to find out more about him!
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We passed the village and stopped in a settlement of two houses in the middle of the forest. Behind one of the houses was an olive grove, and there was a tiny cottage: my home for the next two weeks.
I started drawing the same afternoon, and this was my first drawing – the flower thief.
She’s the charming sister of the wood thief because somehow, it seems less offensive to steal flowers than wood. Later, I also made a drawing of the wood thief, of course. But I always liked her better and for me, she fits better to what I would find out about him later.
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In the following days, I asked people about the wood thief, but when I did, they all started to change the topic. This made me even more curious, so I made sure to ask everybody about him.
Finally learnt about him from Riccardo, a sinewy and energetic man in his eighties who always was busy running around fixing things here and there in the village. Riccardo was pretty outspoken and had already told me many stories, so when I asked him about the wood thief, and although he didn’t seem to like the topic either, gave me some short insight: Si si, il ladro de legna! But he’s a povero pazzo, he’s not right in his head.
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That’s all I ever knew about him, and in my imagination, he – and his imaginary sister, the flower thief – remain some kind of mythical, almost archetypal figure to me.

The flower thief is available as fine art print in my shop.