Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

As a follow-up on my previous post about my early career as a visual artist/person I’d like to share some of my old paintings. I’ve been a bit reluctant to share much of my old work online, yet I can’t deny my roots. The first images, the urban landscape ones, date back to my early years as a painter. All of these paintings were painted on the spot. I was obsessed with getting exactly the right colors as I saw them in front of me. This is still very much how I approach my photography these days. It’s rather confrontational that in all these years (these paintings are more than 10 years old) my subject matter has barely changed. The second batch of paintings illustrate the moving away from landscape painting, heavily influenced by my teacher Philippe Vandenberg, as mentioned in my previous post. Early on in this phase I developed some sort of a narrative, painting skeletons of little houses as metaphor for a persons' reference frame, I kept painting these houses in different ways, elaborating my narrative and ended up getting so sick of it that I decided, after destroying most of those paintings, I would never make anything with a consistent story anymore. In a way this is still how I work today, to me each picture has to stand on its own without the help of companions. To this day I still struggle with constructing bodies of work partly because of this decision. The fusion of these two styles is the foundation of my vision as a photographer.