Two weeks ago I started to publish the paintings I did from 1981 to 1990, on Flickr and in my Facebook account, one picture per day. I take them in a random sequence and give short comments.
Though the beginning of this phase of painting was quite sudden – I experienced a tremendous inpour of energies 6 September 1981, when I first came into contact with the Great Invocation given by Master DK, using it in meditation – I had painted already since my school-days in the early 70ies, first influenced by drugs and psychedelic art as well as surrealism. I dissolved all these pictures in the early 90ies – feeling that they were too imperfect and chaotic. I realised only some days ago that in these early images there were color elements and motives which still appear in a transformed form in my recent paintings.
The pictures are all expressions of a long inner spiritual search for light and an oscillation between eastern and western expressions of wisdom. They reflect inner experiences and phases of growth. Being entirely autodidactic, I felt that my technique was always far from being perfect, just an outflow of creative expression and a search for manifesting light / fire on paper.
Many of the pictures of this cycle came out with a great inner intensity and a desire to “paint in fire”. Often they were done quite fast and in a kind of rapture.
During the 80ies and 90ies I hardly met an understanding from the persons to whom I showed the pictures and I wondered what they were good for – just filling the basement. In the spiritual group in which I was during the 90ies they were considered with distrust, as an expression of personality. So my wife and I dissolved nearly all of the paintings in 1997, only photos of the originals remained. I kept the photo documentation in a diary. But also this book carried for me some kind of a stigma. I wanted to throw it away and told Sri Kumar about it January 2003 in India. He said, don’t destroy it, give it to a friend for safekeeping. And this I did.
It was only in January 2009 again in India that, for the first time, a young lady showed a deeper interest in the pictures, and I told her that I’ll give her the diary as a present. I asked the friend who had it to send it back to me – after 6 years of safekeeping. But before I could give the book to the young lady a strange violent confusion made it impossible. So I started scanning the photos and presented a selection of them at the 100th May Call celebration in Engelberg, Switzerland.
November 2009, the young lady gave me some deep hints as per the paintings. This first appreciation opened my inner doors to a creative expression which continues since then – a restart after 19 years of pause. The contact, however ended a short while afterwards, again with some strange violent confusion, so that the diary with the pictures is still with me, but no longer belonging to me.
The pictures of the “Early Paintings” are from scans of the photos. I tried to work on them a bit, but some weren’t very sharp. I’ll continue to publish them over the next time, not more than one per day. It is an “appreciation” 30 years later.
Choir of Angels, 10 Nov. 1981 – 30 years ago. A4, liquid glazing paint