I am a draftsman and painter. The theme of my artistic work is - generally speaking - the “condition humaine”, the design of the human condition and the capture of successive temporal moments, which are based on sketches, my own photos or on “screenshots” of self-produced videos.

 

On a purely painterly level, I am interested in the gradation of values in the realization of the volumes and the elaboration of the architecture of the picture objects, as well as the resulting texture of the picture surface.

 

Since the all-too-early death of my wife, the artist Bettina Dellwig, I have pursued the artistic endeavor of “freezing” fleeting moments of current and previous (common) life through painting. These are moments that are or were significant for me, but can also be perceived as general, archetypal themes or constellations of human existence: the woman, the man, the child, the mother, the father, the son, the mountain, the Bridge, the shore, the border, death. Related to this are also mythological topoi (Charon, Orpheus and Eurydice, Philemon and Baucis, etc.).

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Diptychs are often created that show a scene from different perspectives and in a sequence of successive moments.

 

“Heine, become essential!” Rachel Varnhagen von Ense is said to have once said to the aspiring young poet. What is essential for me is to give stability and form to the fleeting moment, something that has been irretrievably lost to me, to find the meaningful in the seemingly random. When I was young - in a crisis-ridden artistic phase - and showed my professor at the Münster Art Academy very detailed graphics of piles of layered bulky waste, he asked me why I was drawing them. And I answered him spontaneously: "To make sure of things." I think that's it. I paint, therefore I am.