Summary of an Eventful Summer
“How to Kill Your Muse” sounds rather dramatic. I will get to that. I am back from a summer that brought plenty of painting, a few welcome encounters and rather more administrative work than I had wished for.
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 previous article on new work, Visual Response to “The Last Rag” by SoundEagle, grew out of a conversation with the composer. More paintings followed. Some continued as variations on the first idea; others began to move away from the music.
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.
I wanted the first impression to be of something worn and dirty, like a cleaning rag. Closer inspection reveals brighter traces within it. These belong to the painting, of course; the remembered life of a piece of cloth is the association I bring to them.
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
The blog needed corrections. Some early search results looked encouraging, but visitor numbers later fell. I had changed several things at once, which made it difficult to understand what had affected what.
My aim is to reach people who may want to spend time with the essays or the paintings. A change in visits alone does not tell me whether that is happening, nor can I assume that re-indexing explains every decline. The useful next step is to compare pages and periods, while keeping a record of what changed.
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.
The AI-generated answers appearing in search added another distraction. It was tempting to regard each mention of my site as evidence of progress. I would be more cautious now: a screenshot shows an appearance at one moment, not a stable ranking or a visit to the site. Google’s guidance on AI search features points back to the same foundations: accessible pages and useful, reliable content. For me, that means clear essays and relevant links, rather than a separate style of writing designed to impress an algorithm.
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: 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.
These were a few of the drafts under discussion when I wrote this in August 2026. The difficult part was fitting in a great deal of text while keeping my own handwriting visible within a coherent composition.
The following four versions were on the shortlist for the poetry collection Verteidiger des Regens (Defenders of the Rain).
The version below was the favourite at that stage, which suited me well. The title has space around it, and the pale ground gives it weight without requiring large lettering.
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. Wachauer Marille is a protected designation of origin. The Austrian agriculture ministry describes the growing region and specification.
[2] Heuriger. An Austrian wine tavern; the word can also refer to the current year’s wine. See the City of Vienna’s explanation.
[3] Xieyi and kai-he. My introduction to xieyi painting explains the importance of expressive brushwork and intention in my practice. Kai-he (開合), “opening and closing”, is the term I use here for expansion and concentration within the composition.
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