229. Vanilla (Vanille)
229. Vanilla (Vanille), 2025, Öl auf Leinwand, 20 × 15cm, (Darryn Ansted)
The latest development in my process of cataloging my work is writing a blog entry for every painting and it is difficult. As I have done today, I am sometimes really scraping the barrel of my recent thoughts. Thoughts are of course never delineated with the clarity of a painting. Thought is truly abstract. Maybe the motif in painting is on the contrary an intersection, an Autobahn even, to direct thought.
I started to number my work after a few years. I had seen how painters oeuvres had been catalogued and I relied on their catalogue numbers to research their work. Often a catalogue of work was only assembled after their lifetime but some painters pro actively carefully document their work as they go. I thought it would also help me organize the work. Not only did it help me organize the paintings but it has had the added benefit of also helping me to organize my thoughts.
There’s a balancing act involved in actively putting together one’s catalogue. On one hand I like the sense that art is free and can morph into anything anytime. I walk into the studio with freedom. However, I also know that without a broad unifying philosophy none of my work would be completed, or develop further. On the other hand, too much of a progamatic structure suffocates art because art is not in fact, what Socialist Realism would call ‘soldierly work’. I don’t want to feel like I am in a classroom when I stand in front of an artwork. I am not a botanical illustrator bound to a photographic reality or an artist with a single ‘message’. Sure, I have liked didactic artwork at different times in life. I have really enjoyed the work of more didactic painters like Mark Tansey or the lesser known Dierck Schmidt. However, it is a little too dry to sustain me. I mentioned my preference shifting from the newspaper to the poem in my last blog post and maybe it has something to do with that.
On a separate note, two questions often come up for people studying 20th Century art in Europe, and I thought about them again recently. Anyone who studies German history in detail (from an English-speaking world) wonders how it would have really been. One asks oneself ‘what would I have done in those years of 1933 and afterward?’. Would I have made a stand for sanity, or fled, and so on. Ideology is subtle and propaganda is strong. Would standing up for sanity have felt like using your left hand (non-dominant hand), or like ending your own comfortable life amidst the slow creep of a totalitarian state. I guess one never really knows. Fortunately, Germany today is a very sane place to be living. Since I moved here five years ago, I have only had positive experiences, extending my positive experiences of visiting for the 20 years prior to that. I think there is a baseline civil society that manages to weather the storms of different ideological pressures very well. When reading the headlines from other places, I am not always so sure. The Internet was supposed to bring the potential for education to spread but sometimes it seems to be doing the opposite. Anti-science sentiment is spreading in some parts of the world. For many people the question of: what would I have done when they were burning books is no longer hypothetical, I guess. Paired with this question of ‘what would it have been like?’, often art students are asking why Morandi painted bottles in a time of hardening ideology in Italy. One wants to see an artist as a kind of intellectual superhero. One hypothesizes what Morandi’s thoughts were like in contrast to artists like Marinetti, Boccioni, and so on. Being on the side of humanity and sanity is however never easily explained.
Here I am, painting ice cream. Has the painting shown me something I can’t put into words? Is it an escape from thinking or a bonsai tree on the cliff-face of modernity.
