Coincidence in Painting

When I paint, I usually want to express an idea, a feeling, a specific situation. In order to give coincidence a chance, I tried in this project to apply Borough’s Cut Up method into painting. I started with 5 different paintings on theatre plays, to express the central idea of the play. These paintings were about 180x110 cm size. Then I turned them face down and cut them with straight lines on the backside – so not knowing where I cut.

I mixed all the different pieces and then turned them back up, trying to reassemble them together not according to the content but following graphical issues like colors and lines connecting across the cut edges.

In this way coincidence interfered 2 times into the process of generating a painting and I had the feeling, that such a painting might resemble our world or our personality much better, because we are not a single image, we are a kaleidoscope of different facets.

A very interesting side aspect occurred when Dr. Karl Golling, a profound psychoanalytical expert told me, that this procedure actually exactly corresponds with Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of the human dream. According to Freud we are all the time dealing with intense experiences we had during the last day and try to get along with them by combining and associating with them intense experiences from childhood. At night, when we want to sleep, our brain connects these “stories” in a decoded way, so that our sleep is not disturbed.

In this way, the different facets of these Cut Up paintings represent the different “stories” or episodes which we connect into one dream.

Therefore, these Cut Up paintings also open up a discussion with every person seeing them, to which extend emotional “engravings” in his or her unconscious are reflected.

to view the blog on this project click here