gallery

of detours

An overview of past escapades - a gallery of all which came before. An attempt to sort all my previous detours around art into somewhat coherent categories - vagely oriented at the artists who originally tempted me into creating (by) myself.

human nature

For as long as I can remember, I have always been observing everything around me and inside of me very closely, but I only found my access to art when I (more or less by chance) began to draw nudes. The realization that I was able to put what I observed on paper and thus to recognize and understand things more precisely, laid the basis for all further expeditions into the world of art (including Horst Janssen).

When I came across Leonardo Da Vinci's atonishing sketches, it suddenly was exceedingly clear to me what I wanted to do - unfortunately it was also made abudently clear to me that "Da Vinci" is a similarly realistic career aspiration as "Knight".

colour of light

Early on I was confronted with picture books by well-known artists - soon I wished I had:

Kandinsky's eye for forms

Van Gogh's approach to color

Hokusai's in-line precision

confused chaos

As a teenager I was deeply fascinated by the album cover of Zappa's "Over Nite Sensation" in my father's collection - I recognized in it a chaos that I was familiar with from my (night) dreams.

To my delight, I soon discovered Dali and Kahlo - and my inner world seemed almost normal to me.

Later, when I was inundated with new impressions during an exchange year that took my breath away, I picked up the nearest tool to capture the vortex in my head on paper. This resulted in a habit of putting chains of associations on paper as uncensored as possible in order to bring a bit of calming structure to my mind.