Déjà vu – yet different

After I thought I had overcome my cold, the cold started all over again at the beginning of the week and shaped the rest of my daily routine.

So I had to give up my runs again and refrained from any leisure activities. As the weather and temperatures are not particularly inviting, it wasn’t very painful to miss out on running. However, I’ve been wanting to go to the sauna or steam bath again for a long time, or whatever else makes the dark and cold season a little sweeter. Visits to the theater and museums come to mind. But to avoid spending my days physically lazy at my desk and my evenings on the sofa, I went for a walk almost every day. So this week I was also able to capture a few external impressions in photographs.

Officially Christmas time

As in previous weeks, this one was also characterized by cloudy days between which a bright sunny day suddenly stood out, creating a completely different atmosphere. But they were all cold and wintry. With the transition from November to December, the pre-Christmas season has definitely arrived. I decorated the studio window with Tibetan paper stars and Christmas red amaryllis and rose hips created the right atmosphere in the apartment. Apart from that, I’m not really a Christmas decoration freak and prefer things to be subtle.

But still time for art…

On my Wednesday walk, I got weak after all and turned off at the Museum Tinguely to see the exhibition ÖL [oil, olio, huile] by Delphine Reist. From the exhibition description:

Work structures the life of the individual and society as a whole. In Delphine Reist’s art, things take on a life of their own, offering their views on the movement and rhythm of production, or speaking of efficiency and exhaustion: suddenly noisy drills, leaky printers, window blinds controlled by an invisible hand. At Museum Tinguely, the Geneva-based artist also presents several works that refer directly or indirectly to oil as an energy source, painting material and lubricant, as well as to its fascinating fluid physical properties.

It is quite interesting to look at everyday objects from a different perspective and reflect on them. Wondering about what surrounds us in everyday life is something that goes hand in hand with the progression of life. It’s as if we become indifferent to and even weary of some things that we used to take note of and even found exciting.

…and thoughts about feelings

It was thoughts like these that kept me busy on my walks. Why do I feel differently about the city today than I did 30 years ago? Back then, everything was much more exciting, accompanied by much deeper feelings. Yes, it still makes me happy to walk through the streets of Basel, but the feeling of happiness has somehow become more mundane, flattened out. Maybe it’s because so much of life was still open back then. Who will I spend my life with, who will I love, what will I do? I walked around with a heart full of hopes, ideas, wishes and dreams. In the meantime, most of these vague ideas have become reality, everyday life. Back then, for example, every house held the magic that the person you would fall in love with could live in it. Or I often imagined how I would live my future life in one of the houses in this city. My life is now defined. I have found my love, my home, my work, my art. I’ve got everything I wanted back then and it’s amazing how close I’ve come to my dreams. I don’t wish for anything other than the way it is. But the discrepancy between the ideal idea of the wish and the real experience after it has come true makes a difference in perception. A dream ceases to be a dream the moment it comes true and something gets lost.

Indulging in summer memories

I have been working on another painting in the Alpine Landscapes series. There are actually two paintings, a large and a small one with the same subject but not identical. The painting shows the Lochberg in the Swiss canton of Uri and is based on a photograph I took on the last day of our 6-day, 4-spring hike last August. How distant that time is already, now that the view out of the window is of snow-covered roofs. While working, the beautiful moments were present again.

Like the other paintings in the series, the landscape is fragmented, broken up, alienated. In some cases, the structures of the grasses emerge and mountain slopes become planes. When hiking, you can see the entire landscape that surrounds you and at the same time perceive the small details within it. The diverse botany, the structures of the rocks and how the landscape changes with every step, new valleys open up, crests disappear behind flanks, mountains change their appearance. All this forms the basis of the paintings in this series.

A little snow

After I was able to enjoy some snow at my father’s house on Thursday, the rain turned to snowfall on Saturday in Basel as well, covering the city with a fine layer. It wasn’t really much, which is usually the case in Basel. But it was enough to give the city a different atmosphere so that the familiar felt different. As I still wasn’t fit enough to go jogging, I went for my usual walk and enjoyed the dancing snowflakes that way. With the impressions and discoveries I captured in the photos, I came home with the realization that winter is definitely a beautiful season too.

See all Photos of this week