Technique
I work with geometric shapes. Rhombuses, squares, triangles and rectangles – no circles. Different colors and patterns sometimes even uncolored. All done with small pieces of fabric. Some items are only needled with pins, others are sewn on machine.
Creating with feeling
I create based on the feeling I get when I see something that evokes an inner pleasant feeling. I feel closely related as if enclosed in the motif.
The first thing I do is draw a sketch with pencil and paper. Very simple. Unless I need to study a shape particularly carefully
To be able to create the image of the object, let’s say an avenue of chestnut trees or some other species, then I don’t want the trees to look like birches. All trees have the appearance of their own species. That’s always the case with new items. It is important to find what is typical for the species. I don’t need to draw more than one study of each species, so the sketch is not a full-fledged drawing of, for example, a chestnut alley.
As soon as it concerns nature, I do the sketching outdoors.
Large-scale motifs
In the studio, I pick out sheet fabric that I use as a canvas for my works. How big or small should the image be? It depends on the choice of motif. So the size varies. Let’s take, for example, an avenue. There, I feel that large image areas feel most comfortable for my way of creating. Not because it is easier in practical terms, but because I can more naturally reflect my emotional space in the transfer between brain, gut and hand. I can see and explore the vague inner structure within me. It is absolutely not clear how the picture should behave when it is, so to speak, ready to be framed.
Small-scale motifs
When I choose a small-scale motif, for example a bird, then large surfaces become troublesome. I am of the opinion that a bird should not be experienced as an elephant and that an avenue is experienced as a mini world. It’s my world. You can very well reverse the outcome.
It thus becomes a much smaller image and my perspective in my feelings seeks another way to reproduce the subject. Here the intellectual comes into focus, at least as far as the bird itself is concerned. My attention must be sharp to create the small bird with all its character on the small surface. You may not believe it, but all the inner private feeling for the specifics of nature is there. It is in the soft appearance that the special self-expression of the species is found. That it is a living being.
It therefore helps that the motif is small.
Once I have chosen the motif and size. Do I attach the canvas to the wall. It works great with a staple gun.
I look at my paper drawing and draw with chalk or whatever I have on hand a sketch of the sketch.
It depends on the subject. If it is an “ocean”, there will be a line that marks the horizon and a line that marks the shoreline. If there is a horizon in the motif, it is always included. The subject is so stationed within me that it is neither possible nor even a question to move the horizon during the course of the work.
If the motif is an avenue, the horizon, the road and the location of the trees are marked. The horizon and the road are most important to me. But tree placement can be changed but it affects my light input in the picture. So I am careful to feel that I am on the same wavelength in my outer self as in my inner self.
This collaboration with myself is most concrete in a bird picture when I have to transfer my sketch from a natural experience to a practical picture. I have no problem with using a good photo that describes the dignity of the species. It is precisely in that drawing processing that my intellectual experience and my gut feeling experience find the species specification.
Choice of material
When I’m done with the drawing preparations, it’s time to find materials. A rather abstract experience. I can honestly say that I don’t know in which color scale or even which fabrics to use. It is important to have a tonnage or several tonnages of fabric. It’s used clothes that I buy at flea markets.
Why do I do it? Well, the colors that the textile has, have been exposed to both light and wear so that after a further number of washes they retain their colors, at least very little shift change occurs.
If I’m going to try to tell you how I choose my fabrics, I can’t. It cannot be done. Not for me. I can only tell you how I think I do and why I do what I do.
I am an artist who has my origins in nature and thus I choose colors that hold a certain place. A basis for light’s influence on nature experiences. This whole spectrum with the rainbow and all cats are gray in the dark they usually say is very interesting. Unfortunately, it doesn’t help me much in my choice of fabrics.
There is also a point where I choose patterned fabrics. Everything from floral, dotted, checkered to diffuse patterned. It is also structured and of course plain in all shades. But not gray. Gray stops expression in my opinion. It only needs to be a small shade of a different color scale in the gray and it brings life.
The textile is rarely tinted, so I don’t have those possibilities, but have to solve the problem in another way.
