Cursive Discursive. Collage

The art which Peter von zur Muehlen creates is as difficult to classify as the artist himself. He works in several different styles and mediums. Some of the work is purely abstract and some uses stylized representational landscapes and figures which are symbolic, expressive, and dream like. Peter uses mediums like watercolors, colored pencils, crayons, acrylic paint, and sometimes a computer to create the works which are obviously colorful and also creates works with a very somber pallet (the collages) using found paper. We sat down with the artist and asked him some questions: Q. Why so many different styles and mediums? A. Two different factors drove that over the years. One began when I was 18 years old. I had just started playing around with a more abstract style which emphasized color. At that time I was using watercolors, but after a while I had the desire to try acrylic paints also, and somehow I started playing with crayons, which must have just been laying around the house at first. The interest in color, even though it was happening first with the landscape pieces with the trees, just lent itself to going into the abstract work. The other thing that happened was that after many years I got bored with what I had been doing, and partially under the influence of some other artist friends of mine I started experimenting with different kinds of things, particularly collage. Q. Is there a particular idea or philosophy which guides the work you do? A. Not at first. When I was 18 everything was just flowing out of me. I didn't ever stop and question what the work meant in a philosophical way. I had the vision of what it was meant to look like and express and so I just kept chasing after that. Q. What where you trying to express? A. I don't know how to quite put it into words. It was a sort of dream like place which contained this very personal sense of beauty, which to me had an arresting quality, and that beauty was marked by a sense of dread or evil. Though, that sense of evil wasn't in all of the works from that time. Some leaned more just into the fantastic look of dream like quality which I was trying to evoke. Q. You said “not at first.” Do you now have a philosophy for your work? A. Almost, maybe. It is more like I think a lot about what I have been doing in my work and then construct the philosophy of it kind of post hoc.