Traces

The term "Traces" or "Spuren" holds many associative possibilities. The sense of what is left behind, the discovery and pursuit of those remnants of the past that surround us, and the traces we ourselves leave behind. Artistically, it can be applied to a perception of the environment through a paring down of vision. The marks that we perceive can water - marks or shadows or traces left behind on the canvas through the painting process itself.

The current works mark a returning interest in landscape, a major feature of my work prior to 1990 and my residency in Berlin. Twelve months ago I moved into a studio on the outskirts of Berlin that stands in the midst of a former Army base used by the Nazis and subsequently the Russians.

I also moved to nearby Potsdam, a German city most famous for its residential palace. Sanssouci was the summer residence of the Kaiser and the German aristocracy for over two centuries and it boasts some of the most beautiful lakes and landscape gardens in Germany. Potsdam was therefore a particular target during the Russian occupation. One is very aware while walking around the city of its scars. Among crumbling plaster one finds bullet holes which remind one of the fighting on the streets and in the park, which borders West Berlin, one sees the ravages engendered by forty years of neglect. Part of the park "Neue Garten" in which Cecilienhof stands - the meeting point for the Allies at the Potsdam Conference - was sectioned off as a no-go area becoming a wilderness for forty years, patrolled only by Russian soldiers. The villas adjoining the park, once symbols of affluence, were taken over by the KGB and separated from the rest of the city behind a wall. These were returned to their original owners as recently as a year ago - still intact, but ghosts of their former selves.

The new paintings mark not only a change in the relation to my surroundings but equally in my methods. The larger works, usually developed form compositional studies, sketches or colour studies, the smaller paintings are a direct transposition of ideas in space.

The series "Parks" was conceived and executed on-site in Waschlaus Potsdam, a hall of approximately 600 square metres, and was the first of the large works, painted on the floor, without a predominant "subject". In allowing the painting to define and redefine itself, these large format paintings evolved as intuitively as the smaller works.

The resulting images although not conceived as landscape contain many associative features. It is a modelling of medium and colour on and beyond the surface, not restricted by the single area of canvas but reaching into the next and expanding over several canvases…the physical capabilities of the medium are being tested to their extremes. T is primarily an association of elements that arise from the process and also an extension of my own bodily movement.

In the very process I am leaving my own traces.