Until now my art mainly contained painting and sketching, but lately I got more and more interested in doing Installations, photographs and maybe even some film projects.
Back in the days though, when I was in art school and preparing for the academy I realized, that I like sketching and painting realistic portraits, or bodyparts of the human body. I started doing this by using photographs of people of the jazz culture as reference, which where also the main part of my application folder for Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and some other art universitys.

 I’m still fascinated by the human body, my style did change though over the last few years.
When my studies at the academy started, I simply was interested in figure and nude drawing. You can visit a course there every week, which I did several times to improve my painting skills.
After a while though, I realized that I was more interested in the story behind the people on my canvas, than simply painting for the worth of skills.

Since 2018 I’m in the class of Andreas Schulze.
During the years I have spent there so far, I emphasized people with a transgender backround, androgynous-looking people, and homosexual couples to shine a light on them and their stories.
I think that artists always put a part of themselves into a work of art. So by painting these people, there was always also a story about myself behind it. By painting people with a transgender-backround, I could feel the lonelyness that they probably often feel by realising that their body is not in harmony with their identity. By painting couples, there was a wish of being in a stable relationship, and feeling safe and secure.

For this work I had to spend a lot of time in the forest, which is just around the corner of my house. Since I have a dog, this is what I do a lot in my freetime, which I love.
2022 was a really tough year for me and i started seeing a new therapist. I moved to the place I live in now at the end of 2021 and I noticed that the forest and the time I spend in it really had a positive effect on my mental health.
Everything that I went through the last year I left in the forest and it sucked it up like a sponge. After every therapy session I went for a walk and just then started to realize what I learned minutes before.
 When I was out for a walk with my dog the other day, I saw a piece of tree bark, that fell off a dead tree hanging over another tree trunk, that had fallen over. There are a lot of dead trees in the woods around here, because of a bark beetle plague.
For me, this piece of bark immediatly appeared as a piece of textile and I couldn‘t help but picture it hanging on my clothes rail. After putting more and more thought into it, a little story popped up in my head, using the bark as a blanked, a shower curtain, a towel and different pieces of clothing.

I also did an installation using a mattress, a tree stump, a few tree trunks, moist leaves, a lamp, a book and my reading glasses to create a little cozy space. I wanted to take a bit of forest into my home and then create a room where you feel like living in the woods, but not in a creepy, uncomfortable way. The little lamp does the trick here, because you get a feeling of safety and cosyness, which was exactly what I wanted to create with this work.

“hands made for kindnesses”

When I was in Art school as a painter, the first thing I brought to paper was a hand. My own hand to be specific. I simply took it as a reference at first and later on made it the primary topic of my artistic work. It’s funny, how years later this theme comes back to my mind.
I now use hands as a translation of feelings, Love, in particular and skin, in more than one way. Skin is basically a border between what is inside you, your deepest secrets, your wishes, your fears, your thoughts, your heart and everything that is so very delicate and fragile and not always easy to be shown. But skin also is the necessity to feel anything at all. Being touched by the right person in the right way can make you feel all sensations of your body at once. But letting someone inside you can be hurtful, and scary. So when we get hurt once or twice in our lives, we tend to close up, only letting people touch our surface.
I found myself going through a phase of meeting a lot of people and realising, that I get bored very easily by this behaviour of not showing too much of ourselves. You never really get to know a person and only talk about things that, in the end don’t really say anything about the person in front of you. You only move around in a safe space.
I realised, that in my head I always picture myself digging, literally, in peoples chests, trying to open them up somehow. I also realised that, when people I know do this, metaphorically to me, I tend to close up even more. In my work I tryed somehow to visualize this process of digging, trying to get under someone’s skin by simply ripping it apart.
Love is about trust and patience. Love is about being tender, even if you are scared of getting hurt. It’s about making yourself vulnerable. About opening yourself up and about waiting. Not everyone is walking in the same pace as you are. Some people take a little longer to let you in. But you can love them and you can notice all their personal, little acts of kindness, that make them so very amiable.