at first childhood scribbles, before even learning how to write, as a space- yes world-experience, the provenance of the idea per se, as it cannot be shown more immediate and directly. Everything else seems lateron just decoration when trying for perfectioning the grown-ups‘ world with its immanent illusion which kind of moves us more and more away from what we originally had in mind to express. ..but whereby as children we had nothing else in mind but to ensure determining our site in this world.

and about our hand as mediator of „ sealed “ time:

to lend a hand, but to do so with intuition, a smooth touch with with your finger-language: the handicraftly laying of the foundation-stone of human creativity with related steadily evident questions: where is the origin of this impetus? What makes us handle? What do we achieve and where do we go when applying such handling?

the keyboard of the electronic communication media of our times becomes more and more sensorial in comparison to the original fingertip handling. – We do not type any more but rather caress plain surfaces, we do no longer turn keys, we rather rapidly insert an electronic device, - we increasingly apply magic rather than working by hand. Meanwhile increased are our longings to the touch of our own self which sees itself more and more alienated and which can on the other hand only be healed by the comprehending touch of another self.

in good old times we hand-held our paintbrushes in most differentiated ways which allowed the individualised communication of indications of our messages whereby we either had a „handwriting fist“ or we did write „fluently“, we even developed handmade paper, the basis, before we even wrote the very first sentence.

-n.b.: we obviously still are visually oriented when transmitting messages:

-even though the way God and Adam were shown to have positioned their hands as drawn by the hand of Michelangelo Buonarotti in the beginning of the 16th century in his fresco ‚The Creation of Adam‘, by means of modern reproduction-machinery gives sign of a memorable simple duality.

the questions raised in triune hermeneutics:  „Where do we come from?“ – „Who are we?“ – „Where are we going?“ remain unanswered – just as much as all hand-positionings, finger-languages, interpretations or even courageous answers.

I am not proposing any answers here but rather the result of my artistic attempt to transmit the above quoted thoughts and questions in a graphically compressed manner onto hand-made and ornamented Kahari-Daphne mezereon paper from the Himalaya region: via the use of traditional Chinese kalligraphy-brushes with Chinese ink as well as the latest Austrian aquarelle-medium AquaBrique – simply lending a hand – and seen by virtue of the given occasion from greatest variety of perspectives over far reaching ulterior motives.

when working on watercolour paintings, I personally prefer to use Chinese calligraphy brushes. These offer the well-schooled and skilled hand an incredible variety of fashioning just in the very one tool, for which in comparison several of the European brushes would be required. Just as much I appreciate the various hand-made natural papers available on the market. Under this special emphasis I worked with a Chinese brush and drawing-ink on ornamented hand-made daphne-mezereon natural paper from the Himalaya, so-called kahari-paper. I have especially concentrated on this technique because the images of the signs and pictures of the Chinese astrology and zodiac circle in their reduced fashion, fascinate me.

the coal-works hereunder show acting in unison of games of my hand and the design of the stone-pine bark found in the Italian town of Paliano, thus paraphrasing on canvas with insect applications in acrylics, the  metamorphoses of Gregor Samsas of Franz Kafka’s story ‚Die Verwandlung‘:

by coincidence from pixel to pictogram

technical defaults changed by coincidence the screen-process of my own images and also words of own texts, picked from my computer, elaborated on with various word and graphics programmes and at last printed on various print-grounds – this game often allows new esthetics for the original data document. Every child is impressed by the many possibilities of creative variability by just pressing a button. ,Master Coincidence´ did surprise me in a way when discovering how new pictograms can develop which –though- are no longer readable in the traditional sense but by their runes-like signalling effect can create a new picturesque way of text-reading.

more about this topic: delete it / Ctrl yourself

                                delete ON/OFF & feed H/B

CHINESE GHOST MONEY SERIES: THE ZODIAC

the Swiss artist Christoph Speich –while walking through Chinatown, NYC- drew my attention to the Chinese joss paper, so-called ghost money, which according to Chinese tradition, is burned in the ghost month in order to commemorate the deceased – it‘s thin rice paper with silver and color applications. I buy some packs in a small shop.
years later I use it to apply on it a series of lino prints, called the CHINESE GHOST MONEY SERIES - the following cycle THE CHINESE ZODIAC is one series of it. in rememberance of the "melting pot" New York City, various ethnico-cultural characteristics (Indian, Aboriginal, African, European ...) are interwoven with each other in this implementation. As the rice paper is very thin and the silver films on it are very fragile, it requires the delicate technique of thumb abrasion with a special color. edition: 19 AP-(artist proof) works per zodiac sign.

more information on the Chinese zodiac signs & Annual tables: chiff.com

artport zero 2003

CHARCOAL

the value (the pecuniary sum paid representatively for the determined market value, =“COAL“ also meaning ´money` in Austrian dialect) of an artist’s hand-drawing was always kept  low and still is rather low. A fundamental reason for this may be that the drawing was often considered as advance draft towards a much more comprehensive  and technically much more sophisticated work of art and thus certainly suffered from being underestimated: statements of a variety of artists did not have much changing effect, statements of visionary artists who rather appreciated the immediate originality of idea-drawing  over and above a lateron final version of same. The drawing has always rather enjoyed ideal art-historic value rather than market-economical pricing. With the development of photography and its possibility for technically much simpler ways of reproduction of artistic work processes, photography has meanwhile often taken over the role of the ideas-drawing, a fact which has meanwhile lead to a much higher estimation of the drawing itself because it is so unique on the market. Now photography is fighting the same problem as the drawing did earlier, even though it has reached for quite a while already its art-historic value. Videostill and computer-graphics did increasingly speed up this development. On the other hand these technique-auxiliaries grant the original photography again more value of uniqueness – does this mean an endless spiral in development?