paintings

Shades of Life

Shades of life 2022

To the good, the bad and the ugly I would add the beautiful. Hurt and pain is popular in cinema, but we prefer it’s opposites in our daily life.

However challenging, we usually can find also joy in our existence, if we only develop the skill of seeing life’s marvels.

Where I often only saw pain, I’m often laughing knowing that it will pass and it’s better to concentrate on the present moment and enjoy what is.

Searching for happiness rarely succeeds. Being aware of myself right now often is blissful.

Happy Sunday

paintings

Longing

Longing 2022

I painted this one in winter, it was gray outside and I was missing the warm months when I spend so much time in the outdoors.

It’s hard to disagree with reality, yet we do it all the time. I spend so much time in my thoughts, planning, what will come, and how I will experience it. Obviously, it doesn’t make any sense. I can influence my future, but it will surely turn out at least a bit different.

From my understanding, it’s a form of escaping what is and the fact that I don’t fully except my reality. If I would, I wouldn’t need to dream of a different one and so I try to stay in the now and then it becomes obvious that everything is already perfect.

So I just breathe and look at the world and the longing is gone. 

paintings

Point of View

Point of View 2022

Different, we’re all so different. Our experiences have shaped our unique viewpoint and no other human being is alike. What’s more, in each second of our existence we feel something unique and special, however bleak, painful or ecstatic it may be.

When we think about our life we see individual experiences, larger patches of time, people, places, milestones. It’s a mosaic of meaning built upon our memory of what we felt and thought.

Yet our life isn’t broken up into pieces. It’s fluid like a stream and ever changing, not static. We try to fragment and compartmentalize it and yet we are always here, just being now, although our thoughts constantly steer us away from this experience.

paintings

red cape

red cape 2022

When I was painting I felt something mysterious and heavy lifting from me. Something true to my understanding of reality and my life. Some paintings are a flap of a bumblebee on a sunny morning, others the rich color of a dream fulfilled over many life lessons.

We can run and hide from the truth about who we are and what we need to face in order to not only be free, but to just live better, feel better and be at peace with our past. And there, underneath my normal me, my layers of habits, customs and rituals is my deep I, where there is always peace as there’s nothing I can’t at peace with.

But then, there are also my dark thoughts, prejudice, fears, wounds and anger, they surface, when life gets tough and I loose contact with reality. It’s there where I found the person under the red cape. Waiting to be revealed, to disappear under the light of day, of being seen and not rejected.

paintings

her

her 2022

Sometimes I’m not sure where a painting is going.

I keep on adding layer after layer because something is off. And so they pile up. More emotions, more thoughts, more memories and then it gets even harder to be content with this tangled net of paint strokes.

This was definitely the case here. Only once I started to uncover the lower levels did it start to make sense.

Often in life it’s hard to grasp the overall idea governing your life. Or at least me life. But then there’s that moment when you’re in the now as Elkhart Tolle says. And it does make sense or often it doesn’t have to and it still does.

I have a lot of these glimpses when I paint.

paintings

him

him 2022

It was my birthday and my daughter suggested that we all paint something. We had previously considered whether to paint one picture together, but in the end each created his own.

In the past, I typically tried to create something that resembled the paintings I love and admire and to accurately reflect my vision. This time I allowed myself to paint, whatever was inside me and wanted to come to light.

I can’t remember when creating something has brought me so much joy. I finished first and didn’t feel the need to improve anything. It’s a wonderful feeling to just to be satisfied with your work.

For me, this character is me, even though the title suggests otherwise. It shows to me how hard it is to accept oneself, the truth about myself, contradictory with the self-image I’ve created in my head.

———————————————————

This one is reserved, but there are many more where this came from. If interested please email. 
Thanks for reading!

css.php