In my paintings, apart from my passion for the formal requirements, the manual skills and the composition, I devote a great deal of attention to spirituality, to energy work and, to be quite honest, mainly to myself.
I believe that being aware of the preciousness of life, of our inner fire, of our beauty, can change the world. It ensures that we simply do certain things differently, living in more sustainable ways.
By appreciating life, we treat ourselves, our environment and our fellow humans with more respect, with greater esteem and greater mindfulness. Stress is the absence of awareness. Negative events, in particular, keep making it into the headlines. People stop to look. That is only too human. We are empathetic, but such experiences also ensure our survival. We learn from them and can thereby avoid dangerous situations.
However, the many influences exerted by the media mean than we are constantly exposed to negative influences from all sides; every day we hear about murders, disasters, fascism and ostracism, and this spreads fear, which is inclined to cover up our gut instincts, our own intuitions.
As a result, we forget how beautiful and how precious life is, how many valuable moments we could actually have, if only our heads were not filled with all this information. Like the headlines, therefore, sombre art that frightens, affronts or unsettles is far more interesting to the media, because it attracts attention. Unsettling, shaking up, offending – all this is important in order to bring about change.
But many people believe art must necessarily scandalise or provoke. There are countless works of art of this type that I love, that I cherish and find incredibly impressive. However, that is not to say that I want to work like that myself. It is not a matter of denying one’s own darker sides either, or of ignoring them; it is about becoming aware of them and thereby bringing them to light, or onto the canvas, in the truest sense of the word. I like beauty, aesthetics in art, not to be confused with an eagerness to please.
I like positive energy in paintings. To me, art is permitted to uses its depth and its energy to heal and to make people happy. That is not simple, to my mind, nor does it have anything to do with decorativeness. To me, this is political work. Good energy for more peace in the world.