hommage and opera
I haven’t painted as much for a long time as I did this year and my vigor, joy, and urge to improve is unbroken. Now we are in the 4th lockdown here and I take it very calmly – more time to paint….
I deliberately took a short break from my Corona series. That prevents me from moving too much in the normal course. This is not new to me, when I enter the “feel-good phrase” I make a caesura. I think it was Jean Cocteau who said: “Bathing in lukewarm water makes you anemic”.
I’ve done a few more paintings that follow on from the last works of the Corona series and now I’ll let the whole thing take a rest and then reflect on it again after some time. The last two works, which are shown below, are a logical continuation of the thoughts or painting style that emerged in the earlier series, now mingled with a couple of new aspects.
If the image looks blurry, it is not your screen. I thought more about the state that you sometimes feel when you are completely absorbed in the music and you get into a kind of limbo. I’ve tried this a few times before, and it seems to me to have worked best on this work.
With this work, I have reached my ceiling for the time being. My core topic, the technical and painterly implementation, essentially corresponds to my ideas.
1 hommage – tributes
So I jumped back into the deep end and turn to 2 other topics. Theme # 1 tributes. I will write more about this in a separate post. A new example is this work as a tribute to Hans Hartung. I have not consciously seen any of his work in the last few decades, but I am sure that I liked him at the time I began to paint and so some of the works seem to have deeply impressed me. Only now, when I was looking for reference work, did I come across one of his works auctioned at Sothebys. However, I approached the matter differently.
In my work, I painted the black lines first and only later the background. This should help to create additional tension.
2 belcanto versus Wagner
I belong to those species who rather prefer to listen to an opera and – if necessary – create my own vision of it. The time is long gone when I absolutely had to see certain performances at the opera. Since I live in Vienna, I am very spoiled in this regard. One of the few exceptions is Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen in the production performed by La Fura dels Baushat and Zubin Metha conducting, performed in Valencia (Valencia Ring).
If you don’t like arias, you can skip the Brünnhilde and start at 3:50.
Valencia Ring
This production from 2009 dwarfed everything that had come before in many ways. Particularly noteworthy is the final scene from Götterdämmerung. This scene has impressed itself so deeply on my optical consciousness that I finally have to implement it in my work. Not in a superficially imitative way, of course. The work should not be illustrative in any way, rather archetypes should be addressed or provide a level on which one can build one’s reflections on the topic.
One of the works (finished or not?) goes very well with this production. Walhalla and with it the world of the gods (elite, superman, ruler of the human race….) collapses gracefully. The original light for which the gods stood is enveloped in dark ominous suggestive clouds and a new light emerges when Valhalla collapses and falls into the lap of the Rhine.
The written characters cannot be “read”, they are asemic. I could have used western characters as well, but I think Chinese characters are not entirely wrong.
A few more drafts for “Opera and Painting” turned out to be quite encouraging and I hope to be able to implement something of them over time.
More such works: HERE | trying environment topic
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