"hedgehog" Painting

Henry Walinda, who grew up in Mecklenburg, is an artist whose work emerges from an inner and quiet impulse. For him, painting has never been the result of a single event but an expression of a fundamental need to transform perception, emotion, and stimulus into form and color. His works do not follow pre-conceived concepts; they unfold through the open process of creation itself.

For many years, Walinda worked with egg tempera – a medium that taught him the rhythm of layering and the spontaneity of response. Today he paints primarily in oil, where the tension between construction and destruction has become the core of his artistic process. Each layer may disappear, be revised, or re-emerge. This constant dialogue between creation, overpainting, and erasure reflects an inner movement that remains visible in every work.

His paintings exist in a balance between abstraction and reality. Forms dissolve and reform; structures evoke landscapes, architecture, or memory. Roughly three quarters of his visual language are abstract, while a remaining quarter preserves traces of recognisable form – a balance that defines his signature and offers viewers orientation within openness.

Walinda’s work follows no plan. A painting may begin with a simple motif, which transforms repeatedly throughout the process. He describes this as free, though not informal painting – open, yet anchored in structure. Development, for him, happens through action rather than design.

Journeys to India and Japan have profoundly influenced Walinda’s vision. More than visual impressions, it was the encounter with philosophical ideas that left a mark: the Indian triad of creation, preservation, and destruction, and the spirit of Zen and Taoism, with their trust in stillness and release. These influences merge with the atmosphere of his native Mecklenburg, forming an inner landscape of color, time, and transformation.

Walinda’s paintings are layered dialogues between matter and spirit, memory and change. They reveal a painterly language shaped by experience – one that seeks the subtle equilibrium between emergence and disappearance.