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 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.

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

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. 

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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. 

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 Mariscadora

The mariscadora has learned to speak the language of the sea early; her fingers have read thousands of shells, her hands have searched the unspeakable mud until they started to read signs in it. The mariscadora is a farmer, a farmer of the sea; she sows her fields and harvests them: her fruit are called almejas and berberechos.. 

Unlike the man, who proves himself against longitudes and latitudes, she is driven by curiosity – and curiosity is a form of love of life: She learns to read the moon and the tide; she reads the holes in the mud, she now knows where the shells hide; she bows under the sun, the whole day, her feet and her hands in the sea. Her body becomes the bridge between the land and the sea. She walks in the mud against an eternal, untouchable horizon. Often there is rain, and almost always there is wind. Treasure hunting is hard work. 

The mariscadora is never alone, she is always surrounded by sisters who have arrived with the low tide. When her bucket is full, she helps to fill her sister’s. Mariscar – it’s a work that only can be done by hand, and is done best with lending each other a hand. 

Where her man, navigating through the unknown, lets himself be guided by the stars, she turns into the moon. The sun and the wind draw lines and light in her face; the light and the salt make her what she is; a being of two worlds. During the day, she is the sister of the fish; tied to the rhythm of the tide, she only returns to the land when the sea rises: She has another garden there, high up on the rocks, where another kind of fruit grows.

And so she spends her days, always under the open sky – and what would be her brown eyes, if they didn’t turn blue like the ocean every day, and what would be her hair if she didn’t let the wind play with it?
Like the tide she’s moving back and forth between the land and the sea, a rhythm that finds an echo in the songs she sings, sometimes, when the wind blows goosebumps over her arms.
The songs she sings you don’t hear on the stages of this world and also not in the taverns on the island. They are songs without beginning and without end, songs that are call and response, the continuation of a rhythm that appeared somewhere, the tearing up of clouds or a gust of wind, the call of a bird, the leaping of a fish, the opening of a sea shell.
These are songs that belong to nobody, that belong only to themselves. Being an expression of the moment, they themselves become the moment, the becoming of a nameless sensation.
Songs that are picked up by the wind and carried out to the sea, far out, where they finally die away, already inaudible, and where sound mingles with light and water in myriads of particles. The wind carries the song away from the mariscadora, but nothing in nature is ever lost. Also the invisible, the intangible, the inaudible like the scattered song of the mariscadora writes itself into the big circuit; it gets dissolved, like everything else, in the swirls of the great song of the world.
It will reappear for us, that song, somewhen, in fragments, maybe in the first cry of a newborn on the island, or in a light, soft swell that wakes somebody who fell asleep in a boat in the port, and it will, without doubt, flashes up in the eyes of a young sailor far out on the sea who, for the first time after many weeks, in the first light of the sun, sees the coast again.

(I learned about the mariscadoras at the Illa de Arousa staying at La Platanera, the artist residency of Andrea Rodriguez, who comes from a family of mariscadoras)

The image below is a monotype I made inspired by the mariscadoras. You can watch a print reveal here.

The Mariscadora is available as fine art print.

Die Mariscadora

Die Mariscadora hat früh gelernt, die Sprache des Meeres zu sprechen. Tausende von Muschelschalen haben ihre Finger aufgelesen, bis sie sie lesen konnte, und sie hat den stummen Schlamm durchsucht, bis sie begann, die Zeichen in ihm zu verstehen.
Von ihrer Mutter und ihrer Großmutter hat sie gelernt, den Mond und die Gezeiten zu lesen, sie liest die winzigen Löcher im Schlamm, die keine Löcher sind, sondern Fenster, Münder, Augen, Kontaktstellen zu Außenwelt für die Muschel, die im Dunkel des Schlammes schläft und wächst und darauf wartet, oder vielleicht auch nicht, dass sie gepflückt wird von den Fingern der Mariscadora, die jetzt wissen, wo sich die Muscheln verstecken.
Die Mariscadora ist eine Bäuerin, eine Bäuerin des Meeres. Der Strand ist ihr Feld, das sie bestellt, und die Früchte, die sie erntet, heißen Almeja und Berberecho, Venusmuschel und Herzmuschel. Anders als ihr Mann, der sich jede Nacht selbst beweist, indem er sich mit Längengraden und Breitengraden anlegt, ist sie von Neugier getrieben, und Neugier ist eine Form der Lebenslust, eine Form der Liebe zum Leben.
Das Feld am Meer kennt keine Jahreszeiten, nur Gezeiten. Sobald Ebbe herrscht, erscheint, wie ein Naturgesetz, die Mariscadora, mit ihren hohen Stiefeln, Eimer und Rechen in der Hand. Den ganzen Tag arbeitet sie gebeugt unter der Sonne, Regen und Wind, das Wetter im Rücken, die Füße und Hände im kalten Wasser. Schatzsuchen ist harte Arbeit.
Ihr gebogener Körper wird zur Brücke zwischen Land und Meer. Bis das Wasser wieder ansteigt, geht sie im Schlamm, einem endlosen, unberührbaren Horizont entgegen, sie gehört zum Bild der galicischen Küste wie die Möwen und die Felsen und die duftenden Wälder, die direkt am Wasser beginning.
Die Mariscadora ist nie allein, sie ist immer umgeben von ihren Schwestern, die mit der Ebbe gekommen sind. Wenn ihr Eimer voll ist, hilft sie ihrer Schwester, deren Eimer zu füllen. Mariscar – eine Arbeit, die nur von Hand durchgeführt werden kann, wird am besten Hand in Hand erledigt.
Wo ihr Mann sich beim Navigieren durch die Unbekannte von den Sternen leiten lässt, wird sie zum Mond. Die Sonne und der Wind zeichnen Linien und Leuchten in ihr Gesicht, das Licht und das Salz machen sie zu dem, was ihre Bestimmung ist, ein Wesen zwischen zwei Welten. Während des Tages ist sie die Schwester der Fische. Gebunden an den Rhythmus der Gezeiten, kehrt sie nur aufs Land zurück, wenn das Meer ansteigt. Dort, oben auf den Felsen, hat sie einen anderen Garten, wo andere Früchte wachsen.

So verbringt sie ihre Tage, immer unter dem freien Himmel – was wäre ihre braunen Augen, wenn sie nicht jeden Tag blau wie das Meer werden würden, was wäre ihr Haar, wenn sie nicht den Wind darin spielen ließe?
Wie Ebbe und Flut bewegt sie sich hin und her über die Grenze zwischen Land und Meer, ein Rhythmus, der ein Echo findet in den Liedern, die sie singt, manchmal, wenn der Wind Gänsehaut über ihre Arme streift. Es sind Lieder, die man nicht hört auf den Bühnen dieser Welt und auch nicht in den Tavernen der Inseln.

Es sind Lieder ohne Beginn und ohne Ende, Lieder, die Ruf sind und Antwort, die Fortsetzung eines Rhythmus in der Umgebung, das Aufreißen von Wolken oder ein Windstoß, der Ruf eines Vogels, das Schnellen eines Fisches, das Aufgehen einer Muschel.  
Es sind Lieder, die niemandem gehören außer sich selbst, ein Ausdruck des Moments sind, die selber der Moment werden, die Werdung einer namenlosen Empfindung. 
Lieder, die der Wind aufnimmt und hinaus aufs Meer trägt, weit nach draußen wo sie endgültig ausklingen, unhörbar schon, und wo sich der Klang mit Licht und Wasser vermischt in Myriaden von Partikeln.
Der Wind trägt den Gesang fort von der Mariscadora, aber nichts in der Natur geht je verloren, auch Unsichtbares, Ungreifbares, Unhörbares wie das verwehte Lied der Mariscadora fügt sich ein in den großen Kreislauf, wird aufgelöst wie alles andere in den Wirbeln des Großen Ganzen, das große Lied der Welt.

Es wird wieder auftauchen für uns, das Lied, irgendwann, in Fragmenten, vielleicht im ersten Schrei eines Neugeborenen auf der Insel, oder in einem sanften Wellengang, der jemanden weckt, der am späten Nachmittag in einem Boot im Hafen eingeschlafen ist, und es wird, ohne Zweifel, eines Tages Aufblitzen im Auge eines jungen Seemanns draußen auf dem Meer, der im ersten Licht der Sonne die Küste zum ersten Mal nach vielen Wochen wiedersieht.

The mistake as a gift

I almost never make preliminary sketches, especially not with line drawings. I really enjoy drawing freely and intuitively, and for me, the raw quality of directness has more value than perfection.
That said, I make a lot of "mistakes" when I draw.

In this drawing, if you look closely, you can see that there is another "mistaken" drawing underneath. You can recognize a face in the area of her right armpit, you can also see some unnecessary lines crossing the wings of the bird in the lower right area – and the only reason why there is so much black in that drawing is that there was a lot to cover up.

What started as a mistake became one of my favorite drawings of that book – I even used it for the cover. Without that mistake, it would have never come into existence.
And as much as I still get irritated when I make a mistake and mess up a drawing, I've also become much more relaxed about mistakes. I don't see them necessarily as something bad.

A mistake rather is something that takes you out of your comfort zone, and it can be a great chance and can lead to interesting things – provided you you don't tear out the page and close the chapter, but use it as a ground to let something else grow out of it. Over the years, that kind of "problem-solving" for me even has become a quite interesting and entertaining aspect of my drawing process – it's almost a bit like a game.
I am convinced that most mistakes can be turned into happy accidents – my work is full of them, and so is my life.

This is a page from my book MEGHALAYA, a sketchbook full of drawings, stories, and poems, made while staying with the Khasi tribe in Meghalaya, North East India. The Khasi are matrilineal and matrilocal, which means that all property belongs to women, and a family inherits the mother’s name.

Circular time. A tale from the country of dust and magic

In India, particularly in Rajasthan, the country of dust and magic, you find many miniature paintings of hands and feet with objects painted on them. Sometimes they even have faces. They inspired me for this illustration for a book about yoga ("Was ist Yoga") with Kirstin Breitenfellner.

The most beautiful of these magical hands and feet I found in Udaipur, where I lived some time three years ago, and where I wrote this story – It’s the first part of a text about a magical night in the old town.

CIRCULAR TIME

There were times when I could not tell apart the homes of gods from the homes of humans.

I often went by bike to the artist supply store on the other side of the city, taking the way right through the marvellous old town. I always took a different rout, getting lost in the labyrinth of streets: time was endless back then. One evening, I was cycling back home, when all of a sudden, between houses of the color of sand and clay, there was this bright blue, almost glowing house. I had to stop to look at it. With its big, glowing blue facade it looked so foreign, so different from all other houses that I was sure such an enchanting house must have been built for some deity:

Garlands of last season‘s dried up marigold hang from the painted gate, on which you see paintings of princes riding on elephants and horses. To the right and the left of the gate, in such perfect symmetry as if they were part of the architecture, there are two sand colored street dogs, as if they were guarding the entrance in their sleep.

As I stand there, the house owner appears from somewhere, and he is as curious about me as I am about the house.

I learn it is not a god’s house. But it is a private temple, like all Indian houses – a place where humans and gods coexist. I tell him how fascinated I am with his beautiful house, and he invites me in for some chai in the courtyard, which is just as blue and glowing as the facade.

The color of that glowing house, some kind of electric baby blue, contrasts satisfyingly (like lemon and sugar maybe), with the creamy rose-colored sari of the woman who all of a sudden appears in the atrium with two cups of chai, and who is introduced to me as “aunty” – a shy, sinewy woman with dark skin and bright eyes who does not speak English.

Prem, my host, is a chubby man, friendly and talkative, happy in his magic magic world full of little miracles and self-fulfilling prophecies: an unmysterious man surrounded by mystery, all answer surrounded by questions.

While we are sitting in the doorway sipping chai, he explains me all the magical details of his house, mysterious emblems whose sense he reveals to me with the pride of a real magician (while aunty frequently nods in agreement), including aunty’s many toe rings, which, she explains, he translates, indicate her status of a married woman.

And this sign here for example, half Sanskrit, half Chinese, is to repel the evil eyes that fly around in this city like black butterflies. The painting of the elephant carrying a Maharaja means good luck, while the horse on the opposite door is a symbol of power. The marigolds are a leftover from Diwali, the festival of lights, the larder is not only a food storage room, but also serving as a shrine, a chamber of rice and magic, where the paraphernalia of Ganesh, the elephant god (every household has a different god), are stored. Widows mean bad luck, he tells me, if you meet one on the street, turn around and go back home before you get on your way again. That’s why they dress in white, so you recognise them. The same applies to the milk man. The white of the widow, the white of the milk, bad luck.

But let’s talk about brides now: The dried lemon and chilli hanging from the door frame are waiting to be touched by the sword of the groom, chosen for his bride by an astrologer who makes sure the birth charts of the two are compatible. A young and shy groom who will come riding on a decorated white horse with a plastic sword to enter the house for the first time to take his bride – like Prem dreams of doing one day, in another house, another time…

The Illustration is available as a Super Fine Art Print here.