Interview by Richard Fernhout with Gertrud D
Nobody creates art without having a reason to do so. After he theatre, where actress Gertrud D developed her career as a producer, director and designer, it was only to be expected that she would approach painting with the same verve. When the freedom of painting made way for its necessity, the time had come to display her work in the right surroundings.
She asked me to write about her work, but I believe that there is nobody who can better describe painting than the artist herself. We spent a rainy morning talking about her work.
I didn’t actually start painting until the autumn of ’92 ,and in ’93 I really got going. I have drawn in the past- in the early work you see an outline, and I simply drew a line. It’s more like drawing than painting as it used to be done: people basically drew a picture and coloured it. My new work, which I’m showing at the exhibition, is something completely different. I’m approaching it in the same way as a child plays, without making any plans. I pick a colour and start applying it to that lovely white background. I enjoy every colour I use: it’s very intuitive and playful. Schiller describes this as Spieltrieb (Drive of Joy ), followed by Formtrieb (Drive of Form), and that’s when you actually stand back and look what you have created.. You could call the earlier work non-figurative, but I accentuated the forms that I saw. These days, I hardly ever accentuate a form, but I really enjoy a pallet of colours that you create , with many nuances and layers. The red isn’t just one red, but is built up in various aspects in which it stays extremely vivid.
It’s clear that you truly have to penetrate the work, looking through the layers-a lot more is going on than you initially expect. But in that respect it seems to me that you are engaged in a kind of mysticism. There’s something very cosmic about it.
That’s not something that I do consciously, but that’s a bit like the way I think that I feel and live. People often said they saw a touch of mysticism in my theatre productions. In my mysticism people naturally feel a deeper affinity with the cosmos. Whatever it is, cosmos, universe, God. It’s something that lives in us all and which we regard as a higher world so to speak, but the word ‘higher’ implies that it has nothing to do with this world and I think that all life is permeated with mysticism. In actual fact, painting is nothing more than looking for your own source. That’s why I’m not interested depicting a still life; I want to work from that source, that playful source, and that’s when you get the feeling that you’re creating worlds.
You don’t look for a subject, but the subject finds you.
Ok, but it has nothing to do with what I feel- it has always been that feeling of spring, which is why I call it Japanese Spring. You get into a certain atmosphere, you feel that you’ve started something that is related to something else and you continue the process: you reinforce what you see. It isn’t that I decide in advance to create something to do with spring. That comes about and at a certain point in time you see it and accentuate it. Forms are archetypes that recur, you can describe them as virtual archetypes. But that is not what I think when I’m working, I just get on with it and live for the moment. It’s only later that I see the spring like aspect. At a certain point I’m working on it and suddenly notice that it has something to do with spring, with the blossoming of life. That’s not something that I think of beforehand, but something that you experience more and more for yourself when painting.
I also think at a certain point, by coming in contact with a work of art, people come to recognise that Everybody can see what they want to see, nobody has to see what I see. As long as they experience something: you can never see more than what you already have in your heart. Seeing is no different from recognising, so people recognise what is deep inside them. Perhaps paintings also touch something else in other people that the are not aware of, but which they immediately recognise. It’s a bit like dreams: you recognise your dreams as a part of yourself.
Painting is also a form of communication.
That’s true, you always reveal something about yourself. The deeper you go into yourself the closer you come to the source that appeals to many people. This may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it is of course true that you come to a certain level at which all people are bound together. You have to be able to express it all in a highly individual manner. Once you let go of the surface, the behaviour, so that you get to a level that people can recognise, you also find a fundament that binds people together. In your painting you have made a conscious choice not to use recognisable figures, but to allow forms to come about through your intuition They come from your own physical being. Everybody has different impulses, forms that apparently belong to me because I create them time and time again. They are virtually natural forms that are inherent to my movements. Somebody else would create them differently. Sometimes it’s as if I dance when I paint, and think’ marvellous, I’ve got something’, and that’s a great feeling.
So there is nothing coincidental in the way you put the paint onto paper.
Sometimes you just get hold of the brush, and other times it’s much nicer to use a brush at all and drip paint onto the canvas, which is a completely different experience. But each stroke that you apply is always an experience for yourself that adds something to the whole.
I notice that some of the works are very sparse, but that you do much more in others.
That differs from day to day, sometimes I have a day that I don’t put much on paper, minimalist and restricted, but on other days I feel the urge to do a great deal. I get a great deal of pleasure out of creating order in the multitude, applying the paint layer by layer to achieve a greater whole, also in that great abundance.
How do you decide when a work is finished? Is that some thing you feel?
Yes, I give it some thought and then decide that it’s finished. That very difficult, you get into a very critical phase and think, well perhaps it still needs this and that. But then you are applying standards that aren’t really necessary, you have to try to let go.
Sometimes you have to leave imperfections as they are??
Of course, that’s something interesting, just like life never being perfect. Aiming towards perfection- I sometimes think to myself, no, now it’s time to let go.
It is also essential that paintings sometimes go wrong.
Well, you see all the paintings around you, but I have of course made a lot that I didn’t consider up to the mark and put aside, but they were finger exercises as a means to an end.
Do you destroy many?
No, I don’t destroy them. I just leave them lying around and sometimes come back to them and start on them again. That’s interesting because I had actually thought that it was worthless. At that moment you are free; you don’t want to hold to anything and you start again- feeling very relaxed- with what you’ve got’
A painting is an ocean of decisions.
Sometimes I can see the whole of life in it, and I think to myself, it needs a bit of yellow, see what happens, a little miracle that comes about by introducing a bit of light.
At a certain point you think ,well. Now I’ll use some purple, because the power it will radiates provides the right tension. That’s how life is too, things can be very boring if everything is the same. That tension has to be there, as well as the various vibrations that make life interesting. You know how it is, I wouldn’t want to sit meditating under a tree every day as they do in India. Life is all about meditation and concentration and challenge.
You also collect Sam Francis and own a superb collection of his work. Your technique has an affinity with what he did.
My admiration for Sam Francis goes back to when I suddenly saw what he was doing. I felt that it connected up well to what I think- yes, that’s what I want to do, that’s something I can relate to. On the other hand, I do things that he absolutely never does, but I am inspired by him. Being inspired by others goes right back to the time of Rembrandt. In those days you had schools that went so far that they began by imitate the master. You can see relationships between Sam Francis and Jackson Pollock. I was at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum and saw one of his paintings: almost black with a beige background. Sam Francis was also inspired by that, but he does it very colourfully. Or take the Cobra movement, where you find painters such as Corneille and Appel. Although they are very different from each other, they have a certain style in common. You could just say to ourself, right, I’m going to paint, I’ll splash the canvas a bit with the brush and make some marks with a stick: that’s ok because that’s just a matter of technique.
The most important thing about painting is learning to break the threshold that everything is allowed.
Painting actually involves showing a stage of a process, but we all learnt to judge and to look critically and to measure. That’s where the Spieltrieb and the Formtrieb of Schiller come in, you start from the Spieltrieb, but there is a part that you have to judge and correct. Not that I’m completely against that: after all it’s part of reality_ its all about how you do it, whether you work with your head or your heart. You alter the form or take it as a starting point: this is what I’ve done and now I’m going to accentuate it a bit.
What do you think will happen when you move to the new studio? Will that change our work?
Yes, space is important when you paint- the new studio is bigger, which I’m very pleased about. Having said that, when I actually started painting I noticed how big it is- you have to fill the space. Sometimes I have to take my work here to finish it. There is a painter’s atmosphere here, which means that I feel more at home here than in that big space that I haven’t yet filled. You really have to be intensively present there, and filling the space for a longer period so that things come together will eventually lead to the right working atmosphere. That’s something that I have to built up, but I find it a superb space and feel that I will be painting bigger and differently.
When you first begin you are still free, and everybody has a certain point at which inspiration starts to flow. Do you ever feel a sense of pressure in that respect??
A showing like this one does of course have its pressures, you want to do your best. The work is already done, but I need to be able to show what I have in me. But I am aware that inspiration is not something you van control; you allow it to happen, but you have to work hard for it. You simply have to keep working. Continuity is very important, you have to keep your hand in. On the other hand , it can be very refreshing not to do any painting at all for a while, so that when you start again there’s a burst of pent- up energy.
Painting has become a necessity for you.
It is passion
Nobody creates art without having a reason to do so. After he theatre, where actress Gertrud D developed her career as a producer, director and designer, it was only to be expected that she would approach painting with the same verve. When the freedom of painting made way for its necessity, the time had come to display her work in the right surroundings.
She asked me to write about her work, but I believe that there is nobody who can better describe painting than the artist herself. We spent a rainy morning talking about her work.
I didn’t actually start painting until the autumn of ’92 ,and in ’93 I really got going. I have drawn in the past- in the early work you see an outline, and I simply drew a line. It’s more like drawing than painting as it used to be done: people basically drew a picture and coloured it. My new work, which I’m showing at the exhibition, is something completely different. I’m approaching it in the same way as a child plays, without making any plans. I pick a colour and start applying it to that lovely white background. I enjoy every colour I use: it’s very intuitive and playful. Schiller describes this as Spieltrieb (Drive of Joy ), followed by Formtrieb (Drive of Form), and that’s when you actually stand back and look what you have created.. You could call the earlier work non-figurative, but I accentuated the forms that I saw. These days, I hardly ever accentuate a form, but I really enjoy a pallet of colours that you create , with many nuances and layers. The red isn’t just one red, but is built up in various aspects in which it stays extremely vivid.
It’s clear that you truly have to penetrate the work, looking through the layers-a lot more is going on than you initially expect. But in that respect it seems to me that you are engaged in a kind of mysticism. There’s something very cosmic about it.
That’s not something that I do consciously, but that’s a bit like the way I think that I feel and live. People often said they saw a touch of mysticism in my theatre productions. In my mysticism people naturally feel a deeper affinity with the cosmos. Whatever it is, cosmos, universe, God. It’s something that lives in us all and which we regard as a higher world so to speak, but the word ‘higher’ implies that it has nothing to do with this world and I think that all life is permeated with mysticism. In actual fact, painting is nothing more than looking for your own source. That’s why I’m not interested depicting a still life; I want to work from that source, that playful source, and that’s when you get the feeling that you’re creating worlds.
You don’t look for a subject, but the subject finds you.
Ok, but it has nothing to do with what I feel- it has always been that feeling of spring, which is why I call it Japanese Spring. You get into a certain atmosphere, you feel that you’ve started something that is related to something else and you continue the process: you reinforce what you see. It isn’t that I decide in advance to create something to do with spring. That comes about and at a certain point in time you see it and accentuate it. Forms are archetypes that recur, you can describe them as virtual archetypes. But that is not what I think when I’m working, I just get on with it and live for the moment. It’s only later that I see the spring like aspect. At a certain point I’m working on it and suddenly notice that it has something to do with spring, with the blossoming of life. That’s not something that I think of beforehand, but something that you experience more and more for yourself when painting.
I also think at a certain point, by coming in contact with a work of art, people come to recognise that Everybody can see what they want to see, nobody has to see what I see. As long as they experience something: you can never see more than what you already have in your heart. Seeing is no different from recognising, so people recognise what is deep inside them. Perhaps paintings also touch something else in other people that the are not aware of, but which they immediately recognise. It’s a bit like dreams: you recognise your dreams as a part of yourself.
Painting is also a form of communication.
That’s true, you always reveal something about yourself. The deeper you go into yourself the closer you come to the source that appeals to many people. This may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it is of course true that you come to a certain level at which all people are bound together. You have to be able to express it all in a highly individual manner. Once you let go of the surface, the behaviour, so that you get to a level that people can recognise, you also find a fundament that binds people together. In your painting you have made a conscious choice not to use recognisable figures, but to allow forms to come about through your intuition They come from your own physical being. Everybody has different impulses, forms that apparently belong to me because I create them time and time again. They are virtually natural forms that are inherent to my movements. Somebody else would create them differently. Sometimes it’s as if I dance when I paint, and think’ marvellous, I’ve got something’, and that’s a great feeling.
So there is nothing coincidental in the way you put the paint onto paper.
Sometimes you just get hold of the brush, and other times it’s much nicer to use a brush at all and drip paint onto the canvas, which is a completely different experience. But each stroke that you apply is always an experience for yourself that adds something to the whole.
I notice that some of the works are very sparse, but that you do much more in others.
That differs from day to day, sometimes I have a day that I don’t put much on paper, minimalist and restricted, but on other days I feel the urge to do a great deal. I get a great deal of pleasure out of creating order in the multitude, applying the paint layer by layer to achieve a greater whole, also in that great abundance.
How do you decide when a work is finished? Is that some thing you feel?
Yes, I give it some thought and then decide that it’s finished. That very difficult, you get into a very critical phase and think, well perhaps it still needs this and that. But then you are applying standards that aren’t really necessary, you have to try to let go.
Sometimes you have to leave imperfections as they are??
Of course, that’s something interesting, just like life never being perfect. Aiming towards perfection- I sometimes think to myself, no, now it’s time to let go.
It is also essential that paintings sometimes go wrong.
Well, you see all the paintings around you, but I have of course made a lot that I didn’t consider up to the mark and put aside, but they were finger exercises as a means to an end.
Do you destroy many?
No, I don’t destroy them. I just leave them lying around and sometimes come back to them and start on them again. That’s interesting because I had actually thought that it was worthless. At that moment you are free; you don’t want to hold to anything and you start again- feeling very relaxed- with what you’ve got’
A painting is an ocean of decisions.
Sometimes I can see the whole of life in it, and I think to myself, it needs a bit of yellow, see what happens, a little miracle that comes about by introducing a bit of light.
At a certain point you think ,well. Now I’ll use some purple, because the power it will radiates provides the right tension. That’s how life is too, things can be very boring if everything is the same. That tension has to be there, as well as the various vibrations that make life interesting. You know how it is, I wouldn’t want to sit meditating under a tree every day as they do in India. Life is all about meditation and concentration and challenge.
You also collect Sam Francis and own a superb collection of his work. Your technique has an affinity with what he did.
My admiration for Sam Francis goes back to when I suddenly saw what he was doing. I felt that it connected up well to what I think- yes, that’s what I want to do, that’s something I can relate to. On the other hand, I do things that he absolutely never does, but I am inspired by him. Being inspired by others goes right back to the time of Rembrandt. In those days you had schools that went so far that they began by imitate the master. You can see relationships between Sam Francis and Jackson Pollock. I was at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum and saw one of his paintings: almost black with a beige background. Sam Francis was also inspired by that, but he does it very colourfully. Or take the Cobra movement, where you find painters such as Corneille and Appel. Although they are very different from each other, they have a certain style in common. You could just say to ourself, right, I’m going to paint, I’ll splash the canvas a bit with the brush and make some marks with a stick: that’s ok because that’s just a matter of technique.
The most important thing about painting is learning to break the threshold that everything is allowed.
Painting actually involves showing a stage of a process, but we all learnt to judge and to look critically and to measure. That’s where the Spieltrieb and the Formtrieb of Schiller come in, you start from the Spieltrieb, but there is a part that you have to judge and correct. Not that I’m completely against that: after all it’s part of reality_ its all about how you do it, whether you work with your head or your heart. You alter the form or take it as a starting point: this is what I’ve done and now I’m going to accentuate it a bit.
What do you think will happen when you move to the new studio? Will that change our work?
Yes, space is important when you paint- the new studio is bigger, which I’m very pleased about. Having said that, when I actually started painting I noticed how big it is- you have to fill the space. Sometimes I have to take my work here to finish it. There is a painter’s atmosphere here, which means that I feel more at home here than in that big space that I haven’t yet filled. You really have to be intensively present there, and filling the space for a longer period so that things come together will eventually lead to the right working atmosphere. That’s something that I have to built up, but I find it a superb space and feel that I will be painting bigger and differently.
When you first begin you are still free, and everybody has a certain point at which inspiration starts to flow. Do you ever feel a sense of pressure in that respect??
A showing like this one does of course have its pressures, you want to do your best. The work is already done, but I need to be able to show what I have in me. But I am aware that inspiration is not something you van control; you allow it to happen, but you have to work hard for it. You simply have to keep working. Continuity is very important, you have to keep your hand in. On the other hand , it can be very refreshing not to do any painting at all for a while, so that when you start again there’s a burst of pent- up energy.
Painting has become a necessity for you.
It is passion