The Gallery starts with two girls that I once used to represent this site:
The picture with the red shirt was made on the 1995-01-22 and is a simple drawing. The picture with the green shirt was made on the 1994-06-12 and is a collage of random painted papers, combined with ink drawing.
Some early images, interrelated:
First I want to present a series of pictures wich were inspired by a
painting by Giorgio de Chirico,
“Hector and Andromache”
(it is in Mailand, Collection Gianni Mattioli,
90 × 60 cm large and dates from 1917; for more
informations about Hector and Andromache, see my
“Einführung zu
Homer”). This is
one of my favorite pictures, and when I had, back in 1990 while visiting a
friend, the occasion to use a computer with Microsoft Windows and
Paintbrush for the first time in my life, I tried to draw something similar
to de Chirico’s pictures. I wasn’t used to handle a mouse, and
so my
first drawing
became raher crude, but I liked it and used it to produce about 50
computer paintings within a weekend. We printed them, and than we deleted
them - I think only
one
two
three
survived as digital files. This took place from 1990-08-25 to 26.
After I returned back home, I used
greaseproof paper
to produce more of this stuff in an old fashioned way with pencils.
Later I discovered that I could also use ordinary thin drawing paper
instead of greaseproof paper. And so, on 1990-08-29, I redrew the computer
picture of a de-Chirico-like warrior as a human made picture:
(I called it “Normkrieger” [“Standard
Warrior”], since it was the basic drawing). This was followed by a
week of intense labour, while I produced literarely a hundred drawings: a
deck of cards
and a mechanical soldier called
“ziro”
(both 1990-08-29);
“The White Rabbit”
from Alice In Wonderland,
“The Crimson King II”
and a dominatrix named
“Richter-Ist-Gott”
(all of them 1990-08-30);
“Richter-ist-Gott II (an-other one)”
on 1990-08-31; a girl studying the
“Mahayana”
, two girls
“26,5° östl. L. v. Gr./29° nördl. Br.”
and a portrait of Zappa playing the
“Wah-wah”
-pedal (all 1990-09-01). Later I drew such things as a
“linkshändige Geigerin”
[“Left-handed Violonist”]
(1990-09-03) or a
“Botschafterin” [“Embassador”]
(1990-09-08). Then, after a hundred pictures, it seemed to stop: from
time to time, I drew another picture in that style, but it became less and
less interesting.
The only exception was a picture I drew almost a year later, on the
1991-09-01. It was a collage showing
a girl holding the head of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
. I liked the combination of the black background, the red hair, the
red shirt and the trousers with red and white stripes, so I began to
explore that picture.
One of the last “regular” picture in this series was
“Echokardiogramm”
from 1991-11-11 (I really made kardiogramms at that time).
One picture of the new serie was
“Windhauch”
, from 1992-03-11. It is again a collage, using six different types of
paper, including marbled paper, greaseproof paper and a part of the jacket
of a book (Spinoza, Ethics, to be explicit).
In most of the pictures of the first series, the people were holding something in their hands – the warrior holding a spear and so on. In this picture, I gave the girl with the striped trousers a cigarette (perhaps many people are smoking because they are faced with a similar problem: not knowing what to do with their hands). Unfortunatly, as a friend discovered, the girl is holding the cigarette in the wrong direction – as a non-smoker, I didn’t remark this error myself.
So I decided to use a living model for my next picture to avoid errors like
this. I asked a friend who had recently colored her hair red if she could
hold a cigarette and smoke while being barefoot. It looked like this:
. The last two pictures are 42 × 30 cm in format,
while all the previous picture were 30 × 21 cm. The
last picture is from 1995-02-13.
The next two years, I did six rather large pictures; they are small compaired with the usual size of contemporary art, but large compared with the rest of my works. All of them are between 80 × 60 and 100 × 70 cm. Unfortunatly, I can’t show a good reproduction of any of them: I made photos of the pictures, and then scanned the photos, but the result is not very convincing. I hope you enjoy them nevertheless.
1992-08-13/19
1992-09-27/10-02 is ommitted.
1992-12-06
It wasn’t really made in one single day, but I only remember the
day of finishing. This is the only oil-painting: the other five pictures
are collage/drawings.
1993-02-22/03-06
1993-05-28/06-11 is ommitted.
1994-10-03
This too wasn’t made in one single day, but I forgot the exact
dates.
You surely know Botticellis
Venus
(this here is a version probably made by a student of Botticelli,
probably after a drawing of Botticelli himself. It can be found in Berlin,
“Gemäldegalerie der Staatlichen Museen Preußischer
Kulturbesitz”, 157 × 68 cm). I once decided to
draw my one Birth of Venus. This is the
first
, and this is the
third
version (1994-12-02 resp. 1995-06-02, both
42 × 30 cm). As you can see, they are still
influenced by the series of pictures that started with pictures trying to
resemble Giorgio de Chiricos pictures, although they do not evocate Giorgio
de Chiricos pictures themselves.
|
|
This is done after a photo published with the “Burnt Weeny Sandwich” album, as a gift for a friend who introduced me to the wonders and miracles of Zappa’s music.
|
|
Seven out of about 400-500 flourishs I have drawn. Unfortunatly, people seem to regard them as boring.
|
|
Lady Ottoline Morell caused Bertrand Russell to remark that she had “...wunderschönes Haar, das eine ungewöhnliche Farbe aufwies, nämlich die von Orangenmarmelade, nur einen Schimmer dunkler” (“beautiful hair, showing an unusual colour, that is the colour of orange marmelade, only a hint darker” — my own retranslation; does anybody know the original quotation? It can be found in Russells autobiography part I, “Back in Cambridge again”).
|
|
|
|
Once I drew a sketch of a woman on my dinner table. I liked that sketch, so I tried to reproduce it (I clean the table from time to time, so the sketch had no place for eternity). One of the most convincing attempts of copying myself I used for an oil painting.
|
|
I had much work to get that dark grey color right, to have it contrast with the vibrant skin and hair color, but unfortunately, much of the brilliance of these colors were lost after scanning.
|
|
This is a modified copy of a picture that originally didn’t contain any allusions to chastity belts. Nowadays, I would scan the original and add any modifications within the computer, but back then, I made a copy of the original picture and with black and white ink, I added the drawing of the chastity belt. Then I scanned this modified copy, and then I deleted in the computer image a strap of the bra wich was visible on the shoulder within the original drawing and wich was rather irritating on the modified picture.
This is my very first chastity belt image.
|
|
I kept this for historical reasons, that is, for sentimental reasons, although it’s rather badly drawn.
|
|
An attempt to be subtle: can you spot the hidden underwear in this image?
