Summary of an Eventful Summer
“How to Kill Your Muse” sounds challenging again. That shouldn’t be surprising by now, and I’ll get to that below. 😊 With this article, I’m back from a summer that really packed a punch.
I don’t mean the extreme heat, which was challenging for most of us, but which I mostly managed to ignore. There’s a Viennese expression: “Don’t even ignore it!” That has helped me through some challenging times before. Like the Covid lockdown, when I simply logged off from the world, picked up a brush again after decades, and took a completely new direction – away from representational painting, first toward semi-abstraction and then further and further into total abstraction.
So this painting below seems particularly fitting here. On the one hand, it marks my path from semi-abstraction toward complete abstraction; on the other, it already begins to leave conventional ideas of beauty behind, moving instead toward decadence and decay.
The Summer in Brief
My last article about new work was about “Visual Response to “The Last Rag” by Soundeagle”→ a piece that, as mentioned, came out of a conversation with SoundEagle -homepage→. I showed a few related works then, and a few more followed. Most of them fit the “theme and variations” idea, but they are independent pieces. A few other experiments fall outside this pattern, and I want to start with the following painting because it fits today’s topic best.
The Last Rag in a New Look
“New look” fits quite well. In that previous article, I had already sunk my teeth into the word “rag” – not in the sense of the musical genre, but as an old scrap of cloth now serving as a cleaning rag. This approach opened a door to the world of the ugly. Long meditations on the interplay of opposites – the yin and yang of beauty and ugliness – followed, though I can’t go into detail here. But the core of the exercise was to show beauty, in a broader sense, within the ugly. For this to work, of course, other elements have to come into play to compensate for the lack of conventional beauty.
This new take on “The Last Rag” developed a certain life of its own. Compositional and musical aspects associated with the rag genre gradually moved into the background, leaving more room for a purely painterly approach.
If you just glance at this old rag, you first see the ugly: a dirty, worn-out cleaning cloth. But look closer, and the details reveal the former beauty the fabric once had.
What might look like playful scribbling actually has its technical roots in a large number of studies and sketches centered on the theme of ugliness, decay and decadence. I will include some of them as the text progresses.
How to Kill Your Muse
In early summer, I felt deeply embraced by my muse. Around that time, I noticed one morning that I was dancing while making breakfast. A few questions immediately popped up: When did I last dance while cooking – or dance at all? And do I even have a reason to be happy?
It’s a rather pointless question, of course, because happiness is a matter of interpretation. Sometimes happiness is simply picking fresh, sun-ripened apricots from the tree with your loved ones and baking a good cake.
Shots at the Muse
The first shot came from the tax office in the form of an obscenely high tax bill. It was obvious that something couldn’t be right, and of course there is always the possibility of appealing a tax assessment. But I didn’t want it to get that far; I wanted to clear things up beforehand.
That turned into an incredible effort. The issue involved tens of thousands of micro-transactions per year (!), and three years were under review. Presenting the figures properly was difficult because, for those years, the platform involved did not yet provide reports suitable for the tax authorities.
Anyway, spilt milk. The result: instead of making a five-figure payment, I received a four-figure refund. So that was only a grazing shot. 🙂
A Shot in the Foot – SEO
There was no way around making corrections to my blog. And indeed, the first satisfactory results appeared fairly quickly. But the more you improve, the more the whole thing changes – and instead of rising, visitor numbers dropped.
That’s not really a big issue. First of all, my aim is not simply to get more visitors through search engines, but to get the right ones. And it takes time for “Big G” to re-index the blog. Then we’ll see.
But with SEO, I took aim at too many things at once, which demanded an enormous amount of concentration and stamina. What was supposed to take a week turned into several weeks of intensive work.
And I realized something else: SEO in this new AI-driven world requires a completely different approach. The days when search engines could be influenced through targeted keyword placement and similar tricks no longer seem to me a viable concept – not even for the next generation of search. So it’s also about becoming AI-fit. The results don’t justify chilling the champagne yet, but the direction seems right and the initial results are quite encouraging.
But there is still a lot of work ahead, and really, I should be painting, not bowing down to AI.
BTW: Another perfect way to kill your muse is to re-examine old, dusty articles and stumble over all the errors and oversights. Well!
A Welcome Distraction
In between, I also wrote articles. It’s especially nice that an article series was initiated by BACOPA publishing house. The article is in German, though: Das Wesen chinesischer Malerei→
And then we all met at a Heuriger [2] – publisher, writers, literature lovers, Chinese and German speakers – and the subject of book cover design came up. Completely out of the blue, someone from the Chinese side praised one of my previous cover designs as a particularly successful solution. At least from a Chinese perspective.
After that, I was asked to design another book cover.
I would also like to apologize to my subscribers who were recently notified about a new page, only to discover that it was password-protected. This wasn’t because of secrecy, but because the page is intended as an internal means of communication between the publisher, the authors, and me.
I’d like to share a few of the drafts here and we’re still discussing which one it will be. The most difficult part for me was fitting in a great deal of text and information while still keeping my personal handwriting visible within a strong overall composition.
It seems that these four versions are on the shortlist for the poetry collection “Defenders of the Rain” (Verteidiger des Regens).
As it seems, this version below is the favorite so far – which suits me very well. Why? The most important thing on a book cover is, after all, the title. Here it has room to breathe on both sides, which gives it more weight and draws it toward the center of attention.
The shorter brushstroke on the left is almost exactly the length of the authors’ block it points toward; the lower stroke does something similar with the block on the right, while also leading the eye toward the publisher’s name.
Despite its simplicity, the design contains several ideas that come from Chinese art. There is a calligraphic quality to the brushwork – fitting enough, since poetry and calligraphy have always been closely related – and the composition follows principles I associate with Xieyi painting and with kai-he: opening and closing, expansion and concentration. [3] The image seems to continue beyond the edges, while at the same time everything remains concentrated around the center.
So what may look like a rather minimal solution is, in fact, doing quite a lot with very little.
And By the Way
Working on the Last Rag theme led me to think about music in my painting – and, above all, to dig a little deeper. I plan to share some of these thoughts in the near future.
footnotes:
[1] Wachau apricots: The Wachau, a picturesque stretch of the Danube west of Vienna, is famous for its apricots (Wachauer Marillen), which have become one of the region’s culinary symbols and are protected under EU geographical origin rules.
[2] Heuriger: A traditional Austrian wine tavern where local winemakers serve their own young wine, usually accompanied by simple regional food. In Vienna, the Heuriger is also something of a social institution.
[3] Xieyi and kai-he: Xieyi (“writing the idea”) Xieyi Painting→ is an approach to Chinese painting that values expressive brushwork and the spirit of the subject over detailed representation. Kai-he – literally “opening and closing” – refers to the interplay of expansion and concentration within a composition.
Related articles: Discovering the Beauty in the Ugly I How We See – A Short Article on Perception I From SEO to Water Lilies
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Original works are available at FriedrichZettl.com and Saatchi Art
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