Creative work requires you to go through life with open eyes in order to discover the wonders that the world has in store.
Whereby an open heart is just as important as the eyes. “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye”, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in The Little Prince. This also requires an open mind. The trinity of openness: eyes, heart and mind and life becomes an adventure in which there is something to discover every day.
In order to be creative, you first have to take in a lot of what is outside. Keep your eyes open to be alert to everything, your heart open to feel even the smallest detail and your mind open to allow everything that comes in from outside without judgment. There is nothing new under the sun, everything is already there. You just have to pick it up and collect it and then mix it with your own experiences, filter it or perhaps rearrange it and the result is art. Art that is in turn taken up by others to inspire and initiate new creative approaches.
The love of the open heart and the respect of the non-judgmental mind are the ingredients necessary for the creative process. To be able to work as an artist, you have to separate yourself from everyday life. From negative influences, hatred, the loud clamor of those who seek power and indulge in greed.
It’s about the ability to see something.
It’s incredibly important that we do not take our surroundings for granted, to realize I can see more if I just make the effort.Olafur Eliasson
Visibility was poor… there was plenty to see
Escaping the imposed world
In times when we are becoming more and more networked, constantly flooded with information that others select for us using clever algorithms to make us dependent on them, it is becoming increasingly important to pull the plug. To create time windows in which we are detached from the outside world and only there for ourselves. For me, these time windows are jogging, hiking and time in my studio.
Impressions from a run on a foggy morning
Jogging
Of course, I also jog for health reasons. I could as well go for a walk, it has the same effect in principle. But apart from the health benefits, running a little faster has the advantage that you get further in the same amount of time and can discover more. It can be perfectly integrated into everyday life and is uncomplicated as it doesn’t require any special equipment.
Hiking
Hikes provide more time out. They have to be planned and always take up the whole day. However, they take you to a new environment and different landscapes and are enriched with inspiring impressions that you won’t find on your doorstep. They are usually much more strenuous than a jog in the city, but they help you to feel yourself and release a whole lot of happiness hormones at the end.
Studio time
And then there’s working in the studio. The work that is a vocation. Locking the door and putting the phone in do-not-disturb mode, like when jogging or hiking, and not paying attention to it at all. This is the time when the creative energy flows in the other direction, out of yourself. Where everything you have seen, felt and processed becomes visible again through your own hands. The materialization of past experiences, individually processed. I like this creative process. It is a flow, a taking and a giving in a balanced cycle that knows no loser. Just as the inhalation and exhalation of living beings is an interplay with the plants in which no air is lost.
Encounters on a hike in Valais
From theory to practice
Enough philosophizing. In practice, my downtime this week looked like this: on one of my a morning runs, I experienced the river and the adjacent city in a thick, gray fog. The emptiness that the fog conveys by erasing everything that is further away has a calming effect. Visual silence, so to speak.
The impressions were completely different two days later on my day in Valais, on a hike in the high alpine landscape around the Mattmark reservoir in Saas-Almagell. The vibrant, wide range of colors was impressive. A final flourish before everything sinks into the snow in the coming days. Winter had already stretched out its icy harbingers, but they were only subtly visible and had no chance against the lushness of the rest of nature.
And in addition to the countless commitments on my to-do list for the week, I still had time to work in the studio. So I was able to finish painting the large and small versions of the Lai da Rim this week.
Lai da Rims • Transfer and acrylics on paper • 42cm x 42cm / 16.5″ x 16.5″
