poetry from the sky
Last time I announced that I would write about the background of a new series I might call Poetry from the Sky. That seems sensible to me because it shows how long it can often take an idea to develop or how long it accompanies you.
When I was a student, I went on a trip with 2 friends to a magnificent ruin. We skipped class because we had been treated with an unusually beautiful autumn day. After visiting the ruin we walked around. Behind the ruins, there was a large meadow and further behind and on one side a forest. We made ourselves comfortable on a large flat piece of rock in the middle of the meadow and chilled.
Suddenly one of us saw something high in the air. We puzzled over what it was and gradually it became clear to us. They were leaves! A not inconsiderable number, that danced and floated down. And right towards us. We couldn’t explain how that was possible – here in the middle of a very large meadow. Later I explained to myself with thermals, that the heat in the meadow and the coolness of the forest probably caused a suction.
2-3 years ago I took up the topic (image #1). I have already presented the picture before, sorry!
I remember having a similar experience when I was a kid. Winter. I’m visiting my grandma. Cold, damp day that brought snow and ice during the night. When I looked out the window in the morning, it was partially obscured by a twig frozen to the window. That impressed me a lot and so I also captured this impression in a picture 2 years ago. (image #2).
Poem from the Sky
A few years ago I escaped the summer heat in the city and visited friends in the country. At night we sat on the large veranda of the house and marveled at the starry sky and countless shooting stars. Lights were off throughout the house, but light poured out of a skylight, forming an illuminated cone in the air. And all of a sudden, something slipped through that cone. Very light and prancing, like a dragon. It must have been a long, narrow, thin band. Someone then said it might have been the tape of a music cassette because it had a reddish hue.
I remembered the beginning scene of Akira Kurosawa‘s film Kagemusha (影武者 Shadow Warrior). The scene where the mounted warriors ride down a steep slope – like thick red snowflakes. Red because Kurosawa had the horses’ manes dyed with henna so that they glowed red in the sun’s backlight. For me, that was poetry from the sky.
The first thing I then painted on it wasn’t ideal as I was painting on a canvas that wasn’t optimal for this purpose. (image #3). So I made a change and it came out like this (image #4).
Since then, something has stuck in the back of my mind: characters that float down from the sky like leaves or something similar and write a poem at the same time.
In a new series, I have now started to treat the subject more abstractly and my work is moving in this direction.
This first attempt seems a bit crude. I didn’t want to continue working on it, lest I have to give up the most spontaneous, “innocent” aspect. So I tried another version, which is now more painterly, and spatial, and shows spherical inner workings.
Poetry from the sky has many facets, of course, and I’ll try to cover some of them over time.
related: leaves, video with leaves and blossoms
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