Sketches might be a sligtly misleading title for this page, but the same is “Fast works”, though most works have been made in a fast pace, sometimes several sprints. “Without a plan” could be just as descriptive title, but it presents me as even more unorganised than I am. “Without much consideration” could also be the title, but it sounds wrong as well, like reckless or criminal behaviour. Anyway, it is a selection of works, where I had no idea where I wanted to end up. Some of them started out as tests where I in a small scale wanted to try out a colour combination or technique. Other started as a place where I smudged left over paint, or I just let the pen/pencil/brush flow.
All works shown are made on brown packaging paper, the backside of various old printed matters (course notes, bank statements, …), postcard sized pieces of cellulose based products (paper, cardboard, fiberboard, etc.) or excerpts from my sketchbooks, no fancy canvases here. For me there few things can at the same be so uninspiring and scary as a pristine sheet of white paper or a new canvas.
Hedgehog
🔴 15 cm x 10.5 cm; Acrylic on carton
⚪ 40 cm x 50 cm; Acrylic on packaging paper
Shadows
Pareidolia is, according to Wikipedia, “the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one detects an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none.”
Once I see a shadow, my name for perceiving one or more persons in a picture, I might emphasize it slightly with a few planned brush strokes. Other times stop immediately, because sometimes the true art is to know when to do nothing. One little brush stroke more and the picture collapses.
Meeting
⚪ 31 cm x 22 cm; Acrylic on cardboard, mounted on fiberboard
Party
With a dash of glitter and it became a party
⚪ 40 cm x 50 cm; Acrylic and glitter on packaging paper
Shadows #1
Are they in a cave or on a stage, I don’t know. Maybe they are somewhere else
⚪ 16 cm x 10 cm; Acrylic on cardboard
It's my party...
⚪ 50 cm x 40 cm; Acrylic on cardboard, mounted on fiberboard
… dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.
– Heinrich Heine
[That was just a prelude, where they burn books, they also end up burning people.]
⚪ 50 cm x 40 cm; Acrylic on packaging paper
Committee
⚪ 14.5 cm x 10.5 cm; Acrylic on carton
The Overcoat
It could be used as an illustration to Gogol’s novel
⚪ 15 cm x 11 cm; Acrylic on carton
Shadows #2
⚪ 15 cm x 10.5 cm; Acrylic on fiberboard
Alone and Afraid
⚪ 10 cm x 15.5 cm; Acrylic on plywood
Bedridden
⚪ 14.5 cm x 11 cm; Acrylic on plywood
A Gift
15.5 cm x 11 cm; Acrylic on carton
Alone Together
⚪ 15.5 cm x 11 cm; Acrylic on carton
Wizards
15 cm x 10.5 cm; Acrylic on carton
Shadows #3
⚪ 15.5 cm x 11 cm; Acrylic on cardboard
Testing or Smudging
Pieces where I played with techniques and/or colours or maybe I just got rid of some excess paint. Sometimes the difference is hard to tell.
Heart
15 cm x 10.5 cm; Acrylic on cardboard
Blue on Orange
One of my current projects is to scale up this picture
🔴 14 cm x 10 cm; Acrylic on cardboard
Frozen World
15.5 cm x 11.5 cm; Acrylic on cardboard
Brain
⚪ 10 cm x 15.5 cm; Acrylic on carton
Four Elements
15 cm x 10.5 cm; Acrylic on plywood
Smudging #1
⚪ 15 cm x 10.5 cm; Acrylic on paper
Abyss
Sometimes you have to stare into to the void in order not to look down the abyss
10.5 cm x 15 cm; Acrylic on cardboard
Graphs
15.5 cm x 10.5 cm; Acrylic on plywood
Smudging #2
15 cm x 10.5 cm; Acrylic on plywood
One Way or the other - A Landscape
Sometimes I can’t decide what is up and what is down
🔴 15 cm x 10 cm; Acrylic on cardboard
Brown Pattern #1
⚪ 15 cm x 11 cm; Acrylic on carton
Red-headed Banana Fish
🔴 10.5 cm x 15.5 cm; Acrylic on cardboard
Bamboo
Just a little paint applied with a barbecue bamboo skewer
🔴 10.5 cm x 15.5 cm; Acrylic on cardboard
⚪ 40 cm x 50 cm; Acrylic and gold leaf on paper
Sketches - working fast
Just some selected excerpts from repurposed paper and my sketchbooks. Looking through my sketches, I can see that more often than not catches my mood better than they catch anything I try to draw. The pictures in this section is a mix between cuts from my sketch books and sketches painted on old printed matter. Little to no effort has been made on photo editing. If I had done that, I had probably spent more time on average editing a picture than drawing it.
Often I am trying to draw an expressive face in as few lines as possible. Who are those faces on the drawings? Honestly, I don’t know, the faces are coming from my mind. I can draw a face, but I can’t draw a portrait. If you can recognize any of them, please introduce me.
Uniforms – I am challenged by uniformity. It is ok to normalise data, but not humans
Some of the drawings are my immediate silent comments to what is happening around me. That be anything from world politics, over bigotry, buzzword bonanza, substandard trainers/teachers, office politics, pointless meetings, to harebrained upper-class women yapping away at the next table.
Welcome to the mental zoo. The pigs are mostly violent. The stork, that often follows the pig, could be a teacher or some other out middle class individual completely out of touch. Donkeys are generally ok. Birds, of the feathered variety vary a lot. Cats, how ever cute they look, are bastards. The interpretation of all this I leave to the psychoanalysts and the wannabe psychoanalysts, teachers of art and literature.