The Art of Listening
Following What We Cannot Yet Explain
Article by Ellen Essen
An inner voice appeared without warning, like the mythical kiss of a muse. Strangely enough, it came with a face from a world that, at the time, was largely unfamiliar to me. I could not explain why this particular face caught my attention or why it stayed with me.
It appeared at a time when life had begun to feel like a slow, heavy current. Family, work, the responsibilities that had shaped so many years of my life — none of them had disappeared, but much seemed to have taken its course. At times, I felt I was moving towards an ending rather than towards something new.
The message of that inner voice was simple: start painting. I had not painted for thirty years. I did not know why I should begin again, or where it might lead. It would have been easier to ignore it, to remain in that slow current and let life carry me along as it had before. But the voice was too insistent to dismiss. And when I listened, something opened. An unexpected energy broke through that current and gave space to something within me that had never fully found its expression.
That face became my point of return. Again and again, I found myself painting it from different perspectives, exploring different moods and expressions. Repetition did not exhaust my curiosity; it deepened it.
With each return, my way of painting began to shift. From the beginning, I was less interested in likeness than in emotional expression. At first, my approach was immediate and energetic — driven by strong colour, gesture and the physicality of paint. Over time, that expression became quieter. I began to look more closely, to observe more patiently, searching for emotion in subtler nuances of colour, gesture and presence. The face remained, but the way I listened to it changed.
And still, one question remained: why did this face continue to speak to me?
I could not have known then how far following that inexplicable response would take me. What began with a single face slowly grew into an artistic journey of its own. As my work developed, I also felt a strong need to take it beyond the studio. I wanted the paintings to be seen, to enter into an exchange with others, to discover whether what spoke so strongly to me might speak to someone else. So I began looking for opportunities to show my work, first in Germany and soon internationally. One exhibition led to another, opening doors to places and encounters I could not have anticipated.
One of the most unlikely encounters on this journey brought me unexpectedly close to the person whose face had set everything in motion. The connection came, fittingly, through my art: one of my portraits had found its way to his father in Korea. His appreciation of my work eventually led to an invitation to Daejeon. When I arrived at the family home, I saw my painting again. I remember standing in front of it and trying to grasp the unlikely sequence of events that had brought it — and me — there. Four years earlier, I had known nothing of that face or of the force with which painting would return to my life. I could never have planned this journey; at its beginning, I could not even have imagined it. Now the painting was here. And so was I.
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