Bretagne 1 Painting

Leni Winkelmann is in love with painting. The German artist (*1955 in Gronau) focuses on the landscape as her primary motif. She is, however, not interested in depicting the landscape realistically or true-to-life. Much more decisive are the atmosphere and the impressions, which have a direct impact on the viewer. Solitude, tranquillity, peace, and harmony, and even romanticism, are terms that adequately and best describe Leni Winkelmann’s landscape painting. She has always drawn and painted. Constantly driven by a desire to become better, to find her own way, Winkelmann initially trained from 1995 to 2002 with the Iraqi artist Talal Refit. It was, however, only after visiting various seminars with Prof. Rolf Thiele at the Bundesakademie Wolfenbüttel that she turned her back on abstract painting and returned to her first love, namely nature and the landscape. Nevertheless, Winkelmann never depicts what she sees in a purely realistic manner. On her walks, she collects impressions and memories and brings these back with her to her studio, transforming them into pictorial concepts. Occasionally, she also uses photographs as mnemonic devices. Her painting process is ongoing and cumulative. At the beginning of each composition, the artist is never fully aware of how the final image will develop. Here, it becomes all the more clear that her feelings for nature and the landscape are the decisive elements for both the individual compositions and her oeuvre in general. In addition to her concentration on the deserted landscape, the painter also focuses on other themes. Details of nature and peopled landscapes thus also have their place within her oeuvre. And occasionally an abstract work is also created, since she had been preoccupied with abstraction for such a long time during her studies before her works became increasingly representational and spatial.