Happy Hour Painting

Treescapes and fictional portraits by Rita Erven .rita/ Im a painter from northern Germany, directly at the Baltic Sea. I studied graphic design and I still work as a graphic designer in a part time job. 2006 and 2010 I spent my summers in an artist residence in Mecklenburg, in this wide landscape with beech groves in the north of Germany. I liked not only the empty landscape but also the warm and long dusks and short nights. Although I also live in a city in the German north, it was another consciousness, being really alone for some weeks, nearly only with trees, hills and sky. In my daily busy life there is often no time for thinking about life itself, but it’s always under the surface of the ordinary, like walking over ice every day with the possibility to look into the deep, but trying not to do so. Since these summers the number of paintings of woods and trees in my work is slowly grown. My canvases show more the feeling of a landscape or of life itself, than an image of it. Maybe the feelings of someone looking at my canvases are really different from mine, but I hope he is personally touched. Before and beside these »treescapes« I paint (smaller) pictures of humans, mostly singles, even if they are together with others in a group or as a couple. All of my paintings of trees and of humans harbour a sense of loneliness, intuition of transience and an uncertain longing. Some of them appear more peaceful and calm, some are more impatient. For me, most of them encompass all those feelings at the same time. The possibility to phrase opposite feelings simultaneously is what I like most about painting or drawing. Actual it’s more a question of how you paint a picture than what you paint and that’s why it’s nearly impossible to write a text about it.