A Text for Painting, Color and Trees
Color is the language of the heart. By bringing it into a spatial order that emerges from within itself, it touches its viewers, takes them on a thrilling journey and finally releases them with clarified, experienced insight. However, this is only possible if the picture itself has gone through this clarification process. This happens by way of space. The colors must come together to form a uniform space, to resonate together. At the end of the painting process, the picture as a harmonious unit appears self-evident, needing no explanation. There is nothing more to add or take away. Everything is important for the whole, so that it can work through its diversity and at the same time as a self-contained unity. Only in this way can the image reach people inwardly if they are willing to open up to it.
Prolog
I'm standing in front of an empty canvas. This canvas already contains the potential image, it already exists, even if it is not yet visible. The seed contains the potential tree. In sleep we experience what happens to us repeatedly when we are awake. When we are born, we move from an unconscious, subjective state to an objective, conscious one, taking on an external form. When we die, we return to the unconscious subjective state. Inside and outside are inter- connected, inseparable. Just as consciousness and non-consciousness. Dream, possibility and potential take on a tangible form and then become memory, experience, a subjective state once again. From the seed grows a plant, the „dream" of the plant, the unconscious potential takes on an outer form, sprouts up out of the earth, undergoes a development, grows higher and higher, becomes, if all goes well, a tree.
The picture, when it is finished, is visible, it now exists in the tangible world. At the same time it also lives in my experience, in what I have lived through during its creation. It leaves an imprint in my inner world. The outer experience, the visible in the outer becomes a subjective inner experience once again, like a dream. It also echoes in the observer, seeks resonance with those who look at it and awakens a feeling, an experience, a satisfaction. Then it changes back into an unconscious state, becomes a memory. When the tree dies, it becomes food again for other trees, plants, animals, develops seeds, which rest in the earth to grow again. Everything returns to an inner state. Inhalation and exhalation, impression and mirror from within and without. In this great context, the state of the earth also reflects the inner condition of humankind.
The Paths of Color
I follow different paths or trails in my life. But in reality it is one way, because somehow eve- rything belongs together. On the one hand I follow painting and color because they belong to me, are my language and my life. On the other hand trees, because they have been my home since my childhood, they offer protection and reassurance.
Life holds many clues and possibilities in store for us. If we open up quietly a connecting thread runs through everything.
I believe that every human being, every animal, every plant is something special, valuable, almost sacred. They are an echo of the earth, of the inner song she sings, and which it is our task to hear.
My path to painting and color was long, and will go on much further, forming that inner connection.
Before I studied painting at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, I worked intensively with the indigenous Australians, the Aborigines. With their understanding of creation and the cosmos. To me our western way of thinking, our concepts about life and death seemed poor and not very useful. In the Aboriginal vision, all things are interconnected. Being born is a condition similar to a pendulum. We go from an unconscious to a conscious state and when we die the pendulum reverts back to the unconscious state of our existence.
In our Western mindset much is considered in isolation, community is mainly on a business basis and is focused on what contact with someone else can deliver. The Aborigines have long warned us that the destruction we inflict on nature will rebound against us. It is coming true today, and we need climate summits that in fact do nothing but show the catastrophic scale of the depletion of nature worldwide.
I see art, painting in particular and color as a possible inner way out of this predicament. The painterly use of color is my elixir of life, from which I would like to offer some to anyone who wants it. Color is a constructive, supportive force and counteracts the destructive and ruinous with powerful images.
In the evening when I drive home from my studio over the Hackerbrücke in Munich, I always notice the many young people sitting on the railing like pigeons, one next to the other, enjoying the sunset. They don't sit looking at the beautiful Munich skyline with the towers of the Frauen- kirche, but turn to the other side, magically attracted by the glorious colors of the fading sun.
At first I studied illustration, but realized later on, that interpreting something, capturing a particular story in images, is not fulfilling. A spirit of adventure and exploration is missing in illustration. The courage to fail, falter, and let something new emerge.
Today I realize that most art only illustrates the actual state of things, it doesn't ask
questions or develop new ideas, it usually reacts to the current social and political situation, delivers its interpretation at the same time. In the process it loses all that is mysterious, transcendent, sen- sual, emotional, and above all its independence.
The Abstract Expressionists believed that they could change people with their painting. Today, freedom is once again an important theme, because our freedom is increasingly being restric- ted. There is no more wilderness, we can no longer live embedded in nature and our thoughts and actions are being manipulated, by economics and the search for success. For me, art has remained the only free space, but it is also suffering from extreme pressure of the art market.
While studying illustration I spent a year, 1993/94, at the University of Ulster in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The Troubles, as they were called, were still in full swing. Whenever a bomb exploded, one of my flatmates from Germany went with his camera to the affected neighborhood to take photos, which he then, back in Germany, worked up into an aesthetic illustrated coffee-table volume. I thought at the time that this was not my way, because while he was able to leave, others had to stay, they couldn't escape the misery from which he earned money. Thus it was that my decision came about at that time that I wanted to bring something new, something positive into the world, something constructive. On the heels of this experience, I discovered Robert Lawlor's book Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal dreamtime through a friend. It really fascinated me, so that I wrote my thesis on this topic, which in turn took me to Australia later.
Ingrid Floss