Method

Painted directly from the sitter. The drawing holds the likeness; the colour does not.

What Freud called the parapraxis — the slip — appears here at the level of colour. The face is described, but the colour filling it was not chosen in advance and made no claim to reproduce nature. It arrived the way the disturbed stroke arrives.

That was the original thesis: an attempt at a reversible method of picture construction. The arrangement was not directed. The sitters entered the room one after another, each finding her own place in the picture and taking the position she felt in that moment. The picture came about over several passes.

The constellation serves here to give relationship a place in space, not to make a therapeutic claim. It replaces the compositional apparatus.

An examination of the loss of autonomy — the point at which a person stops belonging to herself.

The work proceeds from Arno Gruen’s Der Verrat am Selbst. Die Angst vor Autonomie bei Mann und Frau (1984), which describes the surrender of the self as an adaptation learned early and defended for a lifetime.

Here too I build a condition. But I do not wait for a self-chosen position to give way; I set the restriction myself, the same for everyone, and record what the body does against it.

There was a template, the same for everyone taking part. The sitters sat on the table and placed their shoes, which they had chosen themselves beforehand, on this template. Every position of the feet was therefore identical, as a sign of unfreedom. The shoes were painted by the sitter.

The shoes were then filmed in a narrow frame fixed by a camera on a floor tripod. The feet were not allowed to move, holding on at the edge was permitted, the body was free to move. To produce any movement at all within the frame on the floor, the whole body had to strain. At the end of the filming each sitter was free to release the rigid pose however she wanted.

The videos run on old analogue television sets in a continuous loop, stacked in the same order as the tiles of the painted series.

• MediumVideo installation · Acrylic on canvas
• ReferenceArno Gruen, 1984
• Year2012

The sitter chooses the position. Not the painter.

Place, pose and form — clothed or nude — are chosen by the sitter. The final drawing is selected together.

What the protocol brings out is not a pose. It is what remains once a pose can no longer be sustained.

1. 01The sitter chooses a pose she can hold for as long as possible. That is the only instruction.
2. 02Despite this instruction, almost every sitter chooses a pose that begins to hurt within a short time. Duration was asked for; presentation is chosen.
3. 03The position is held. The tension that follows is neither released nor staged. It accumulates.
4. 04The sitter notes where the pain or the strain sits, and looks for a considerably more comfortable pose for the next round. Pain and strain set its direction.
5. 05Several sheets document the disappearance of self-presentation.
6. 06After the sitting the sketches are discussed together. One is selected and painted.

In a position held past its limit, the hands fail first. They register the tension before it shows in the face.

Every picture I chose to study also chose something in me. The selection was never neutral. Each study also marked a change in me that I could not yet name.

In those years I studied the old masters, not to copy them but to read them. At the beginning I sat for hours in front of a picture and did not know where to start. In doing so I noticed the recurring measure: the smallest common unit on which the whole composition rests and which can be tested against the square. With it run the axes of movement, the lines along which the eye is led.

For a decade and a half I had not consciously worked with classical tools of construction. In studying the masters they entered, not because I had sought them out but because they lay in the pictures I was examining: the measure, the axis of movement, the golden section, tenebroso and chiaroscuro, the format, proportion-driven design. Afterwards I did not build to a scheme; I set these tools into the methods that had grown out of the non-verbal part of the work.

A second thing became clear more slowly. Which pictures drew me and how I read them shifted as I shifted. The choice was a kind of self-portrait: what I selected for study told me where I stood, just as years later the position a sitter chooses tells me where she stands.

Every picture has a rhythm. The studies were therefore not made for one-to-one reproduction; they come closest to a score: a sheet in search of the melody, of the notes behind the colour.

The hand says more than the voice.

Since 2020 the work has narrowed to the hands. They were the place where the trace appears first. In the drawing cycles the hands fail before the face gives way. This cycle takes them as the whole subject.

Drinking Hands and Talking Hands open it: the gesture treated not as illustration but as speech. One cannot not communicate, and Watzlawick’s axiom holds for the resting hand as well. When no word is spoken, it goes on speaking.

Studying the old masters left behind a question the cycle keeps open. Is the gesturing hand in a baroque composition a device of construction, a way of steering the eye and binding the figures to one another? Is it a cultural particularity? Or both at once? The cycle does not decide. It puts the question to every hand it draws.

The moment the pose gives way, or just after.

Out of the observations made in the drawing cycles, attention moved from the pose to the tipping point, that is, to the moment it is given up. The way there again ran through several steps, which this time were not held down in sketches.

The tipping point does not last long enough to be drawn. Where the drawing cycles work with duration, this series works with a fraction of it, and for that the hand is too slow. Hence photography and video. Afterwards I select from the recordings the position that came closest to the tipping point. That is the same act as selecting a sheet after a sitting.

Photograph and video are sketch material and nothing else. They cannot be taken over one to one, or the distortion of the lens writes itself into the painting.