perception is an activity

The proces of human perception has an active and a passive aspect. We are passive when a visual impression enters our eye. But, having one's eyes open does not mean you actually see something. An active process has to take plaze: one registers, names, recognizes what one sees. Only then one can speak of perception. Seeing is an activity that everyone performs in his of her own way. A lot of unconscious thinking-activity is involved in this process.

I started painting as a photographer. Painting to me is a form of active photography. Not just everything around us is an objective and given fact, your way of perception is a given fact too. One can learn to find out about this activity, by getting to know your own system. In that, you can find out a lot about yourself and the way you react to the world around you.

Theory of colour has my interest since a long time, and through Goethe's vision on this subject I could start to compare processes of colour to processes of (my own) perception an d consciousness. By mapping different types of colourprocesses, I could map my own processes of becoming conscious. In painting studies, which are not meant to be art but are made purely for the sake of research, I explored the logic that is inhibited in colour. In this way I try, over and over, to enter the more unconsious realms of consiousness and perception. Painting then becomes a tool, that allows the hands to express what the body knows. Feeling and sensing becomes wordless understanding, another form of knowlegde.

It's a way to bring painting to life. When the creative process of an artwork is in line with certain processes of perception, the work gets immersed whith content, almost as if beings are coming who incarnate themselves in the work. A gesture of the brush, or a blurred spot of colour can become a carrier of something that has a life of its own. Effects like this guide you through the work. You can use it for your own purposes, but so-called abstract painting can also become a form of ethereal photography. In my work, I have a dialogue with the things that ensoul it, and from that I learn.