For me, painting is “storytelling”- telling stories or depicting sceneries which tempt people to retell or invent stories. Something similar can be discovered in sculpture, music and poetry. Blurrings, hints, ambiquities and compositions support the imagination when viewing sketches, drawings and pictures.

As a painter I ask myself this question. I see my task as a creative reaction to three contradicting phenomena of our time:

Real human relationships versus virtual world; regional cultures versus globalization; slow down versus hectic.

Real-virtual: People always do something real: they work, they discuss, they are alpinists or desert dwellers. Even in big cities they are looking for micro worlds, places where you can sit together and exchange ideas. As a mountaineer, I was always in a rope team alongside other rope teams. In Chicago, people met in the garden restaurant of a pizzeria next to the John Hancock Tower. Markets are the most important meeting places everywhere.

Regional-global: Around the globe, in the same latitudes, same, similar or variants of the same cultural techniques can be found, this is also shown by my own observation. Examples: earth building technology, agricultural techniques, handicrafts, social meeting places. I document this in my acrylic paintings, watercolour studies or sketches, mostly with wax or oil crayon.

Slow-hectic: In many old, still to be observed cultural regions and climatic zones, but also today, I can see that people in groups and clans are cared for and dealt with in relation to nature and the environment, as well as in dealing with material resources. This self-image is sustainable without these societies using or knowing this term.

What is called “composing” in painting and the visual arts means “designing” in architecture. The main features of the motif on the painting surface (format) correspond to the regulating reference lines of a building in the planning environment – the question of light and the selected position of the sun are identical (unless they are negated in favor of a flat world of colors as in the “Fauves” or in certain postmodern tendencies in Architecture). The colorfulness in painting finds its correspondence in the spatiality – the structure and form of the design correspond to the building structure and volumetric – the brush stroke (ductus) with expression in materiality and formation in detail. Similar connections could be made with music, composition and playing. “The first sketch” in the architectural or urban development design process or a “sketch in retrospect” explaining the design idea are often painterly impressions. Three examples Louis Kahn was a painting architecture, also the Egyptian Hassan Fathy and Renzo Piano a Master of Expressive Sketching.

Sketching – an independent medium