Playing in blue Painting

I always loved paint and colors, I remember being ten year old and in heaven when my father, an engineer, built for me something I had seen at a fair and fell in love with, a sort of disks player where one would pour paint on the wood plates and then push a button and the thing would start spinning and the paint would create crazy splashing effects. That was 1972, and spin art had started being made by Annick Gendron, Alfons Schilling ad other. But I only took my first painting class in New York in my early thirties. Of that very first class I remember two things: my hope that the model would not take off all his clothes and what the teacher kept repeating “Squint your eyes”. Probably one of the most important things a beginner can learn. I went back to colors around 2000, taking evening classes at the Art Students League in NYC for water color on Thursday evenings with Fredrick Wong, who passed away in 2019, and pastels on Wednesday with a teacher who was great but whose name unfortunately I can not remember. Selling a painting at the League Christmas students exhibition was one of the happiest moments of those years. I just could not believe someone would part from money to hang on his or her wall or give as a present something I made! They were red, bold gladioulus in pastel (in time I learned that red has major power of attraction, although the first little picture I sold in Berlin was black and green and brown…”First spring bloom in Tiergarten”…to an American tourist!). Those classes were important also in helping me cope with the desperation of September 11 in New York. I remember being in Wong’s group 48 hours after the horror had happened, and feeling for the first time almost protected, insulated from the smells, the fear, the numbness. Nobody talked about it, for two hours we were somewhere else. I kept taking classes and attending open live sketching sessions albeit not regularly until my daughter arrived in early 2005. At that point the quiet and mental space needed to paint were gone. So was all my time and the space in my tiny apartment. For 13 years. As years passed I was missing colors more and more, until in September 2018, after having baby-sat a painter friend of mine’s house in Berlin – where I had moved meanwhile – while she was on vacation, something clicked. I went back to my apartment, put an additional table in my bedroom, stocked up on material and started learning again.