I have been painting and drawing since my childhood, but the materials have changed over the years:
Paints, brushes, paper and canvases have given way to a camera and numerous image editing and rendering programs. In my twenties, my interest in art grew steadily, which I owe in large part to my art teacher, who taught me on the second educational path. I was particularly enthusiastic about Surrealism and DADA and my joy in it is still unclouded today. Maybe my father also gave me something in the cradle. He was a trained typesetter and lithographer and later retouched covers of records and radio play cassettes - all of course still analogue. He was also an enthusiastic amateur photographer. What I do digitally these days is similar in many ways:
With a variety of different digital working techniques and with great attention to detail, I create surrealist fantasy worlds from my own photographs, digital painting and self-created renderings of 3D fractals. The objects I photograph with my digital SLR camera are often found in natural history and folklore museums. I love old things and like to put them in unexpected contexts. Documenting reality in all its facets has never been my goal, because reality already exists. Instead, I would like to supplement and enrich them with new and unimagined dimensions.
Strictly speaking, my works are collages, but I try to achieve an overall harmonious and uniform impression with all my different starting materials.
Lately I find more and more pleasure in the abstract, because of the boundless freedom to detach from the concrete.
As much as I love art, I never expected to work as an artist. But after completing my studies in sociology and German literature at Leibniz University Hanover, I had to find a field of activity for family reasons that allowed me to work from home. As a single mother of three sons, the youngest of whom is disabled, it had become impossible for me to pursue a regular professional activity. I saw this as an opportunity to devote myself to art to a greater extent – now unbound in time. I was amazed by the endless possibilities that digital art offered me without the cost-intensive use of materials and large storage requirements to visualize my ideas. With a mentally disabled child, you can't leave dangerous liquids like turpentine at home and colors would end up where you don't like to see them.
Since 2018 I have been working as a freelance artist and designer. Since then I have published numerous calendars and puzzles at “Calvendo Verlag”, as well as some small picture books at the self- publisher “BoD”. In addition, in the same year I started to offer my pictures for sale on various marketplaces on the Internet and since about a year I also run my own online shop.
In August 2019, I showed my series "Birds, Critters and Fractals" in a self-initiated virtual online exhibition. With three of my pictures I won at the "American Art Awards 2021" in the categories "Manipulated Photography – Human or Animal" and "Landscape or Still Life" and recently with a portrait at the 8th “Kunst-Online Preis”. As part of a group exhibition of Italian artists under the motto “I love Italy” in the gallery “Art Nou Mil.Leni” in Barcelona in May of this year, one of my surrealistic paintings was also selected. Two more of my (abstract) paintings can be seen from 15 to 30 June as part of the video exhibition “HIPNOS tra sogno e realtà” at Palazzo Revedin Pisani at the 59th Venice Biennale.
For a long time, I have wished that my pictures do not slumber on the hard disk, but that they get out into the big wide world and inspire numerous people to dream and fantasize. That actually seems to be starting now!
Garrulus glandarius