Sarastro Painting

The driving force behind my work is the sheer joy and pleasure I take in the creative process of imagination. The term ‘imagination’ is often used in the sense of ‘inventiveness’ as the skill to make new, original things, but alternatively it may also denote the ability to form mental images. I enjoy combining these two activities and giving material expression to them. Thus, my paintings are playful inventions of pictorial contents and motives using novel artistic forms and original graphic designs. Frequently I find inspiration in literary texts as their narratives already result from the authors’ imaginative skills in the first place. However, the textual, rather than pictorial contents of these works serve only as a kind of ‘inspirational raw material’, to which I attach new meaning and which I interpret freely in the course of my own work, which brings about a substantial transformation of the initial subject matter. The resulting pictures have a riddle-like quality, and, in order for viewers to decipher them, they need to reconstruct and follow the transformative mental associations I employed in the first place. In this way, viewers re-create my pictures and thus become active parts of the artistic enterprise. By choosing topics from well-known, often classical literature, I aim to facilitate the viewers’ task, without rendering it trivial, though. I consciously restrict myself to a very narrow range of materials – mainly watercolor and gouache –, and I seek to develop and refine my painting technique within these self-imposed limits. For instance, I use only a special kind of watercolor paper and I have developed a particular technique of mixing watercolor and gouache that emphasizes and brings to live the characteristic optical properties of the different materials. However, this and other forms of craftsmanship never constitute an end in themselves, but merely serve to increase and intensify the visual effect my imaginative pictures produce. Since my work often derives from written texts, it is rooted in the long tradition of artistic illustration and shares certain common features with some important historical forebears of this genre, for example, with the illuminated medieval manuscripts, with the literary painters’ books of the early-to-mid 20th century, but also with artistic children’s books in general.