090725 Ripples Blue 24″x48″ acrylic and gold leaf on canvas
After I finished Ripples Red I felt like painting another, bigger one. In the beginning I imagined it red as well but during the week it turned into a deep ocean like manganese blue. Like a wide deep blue sea inside.
Do you remember this movie “The Sea Inside” ( “Mar Adento” or “Das Meer in mir” I like the German title because it implies “within” instead of “inside”) by this oh so well-gifted Spanish director which name I always forget although I have seen all his movies ( maybe not all but a lot ) Alejandro Amenábar? It is about dying with dignity. I remember beautiful but empty, abandoned landscapes - a cold Atlantic beach shore and a person with an unmovable body chained to a bed but free in spirit and another person that was free to go where she wanted but seemed chained in her heart. Galizier Ramón Sampedro is disabled since his accident 27 years ago but leaves in his mind to visit his beloved sea.
This painting is as true to me as the red one – I could do the magic twice. After I finished it, I felt dissolved and ready to embrace a little break from painting. Over the past weeks I spend much time setting up the new web page ( so you can actually buy my art work directly from me – here and now – and I ship it around the globe 
) and was simultaneously engrossed in painting – the little down time comes as a gift. Sometimes inspiration comes in waves and it just rolls over me – I accepted it.
Summer Vacation in the Schoening Castle
I am taking a break from painting right now and it is an experience of a special kind. Since March I spend a lot of my free time with my art or educating myself about the rules of the online world and this break felt weird first but turned out to be necessary and a good decision.
The time to reflect, allows other things, new and long buried ones, to emerge and brings playfulness back into my life that I enjoy so much. I think a lot about the experiences I had with every painting and surprisingly had to find out that there were some I “cramped” while painting them. At the same time there where others I approached in a very playful way and these where the ones that gave me the most joy.
I remember an artist, I had a conversation with, about how I sometimes wish I could paint highly figurative paintings which I truly value, for one reason of many – because of the skills in handling the medium they require. And I said, the truth is, every time I start these kind of paintings I get bored very quickly and don’t get beyond the sketches. She laughed and said: ” I know. You may not always like first, what you ‘need’ to paint”.
The picture is from yesterdays sunset in Playa del Rey the color palette is unbelievable!