My mother had birthday and I made this painting for her. It shows my grandmother with my mother as a baby (acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30cm)
My grandmother was a very beautiful and complicated woman, full of love and hate, black and white, who lived through horrible times in Nazi-Germany. Today perhaps someone would diagnose something like a borderline personality disorder and trauma because of the war, but back at the time…. My mother as a child was overburdened, every second day her parents fought, and my grandmother sought help by her young daughter. As a six-year-old, my mother had to pack repeatedly a suitcase and “rescue” her mother. Later my grandmother hurt herself and blamed her daughter for her actions. Or turned the telephone of after she threatened to kill herself… I think you get an image. But nevertheless, my mother always deeply loved her mother, although she caused her so much suffering.
Here you can see bits of my painting process
While painting the present for my mother I was so conflicted, because on the one hand I wanted to respect my mothers love of her mother, but on the other hand I saw how much my grandmother had minimized my mother. How often did she tell her how ugly she was, with “big bones” and her “jewish” nose. For my grandmother beauty was so important, but only she was beautyful in her eyes. So, I started a second painting, which for me shows the ambiguity of my grandmother. This painting is now in an exhibition and I did not dare to explain it to my mother.
Now I have a very conflicted relationship with “beauty” as I tried to express in this poem (it is translated, and I hope it works in English too)
How can something be so empty but also so much sought after. Rotting flowers and a fly on top. Dark colours to remind us that nothing is permanent besides god.
But he cannot be seen in an image. And in your life? Is beauty god.
Do I want beauty to be god, so that I am allowed to like it? The interior is turned outside and shows abundance, fragments, void, slime, ether, fire, thought – all is burning, if I contemplate it long enough, all is burning. When I look away and cool myself down, then the fire stops, and I dissect the beauty into pieces. The pieces fall on the ground and could be recomposed another time. The other, who is looking at the former beauty now only notices the destroyed. He must resume searching.
I have tidied up neatly, brightened the dark colours so much, that everybody is dazzled. A radiating idea, god in emptiness, the missing of everything, love in nothing, a beginning.
And for the completeness: the painting process of the second painting
The two paintings are my contribution to @juliakponsford ART EXPLOSION WEEK 26: Theme VINTAGE
Thank you so much for this theme, it was perfect timing for me :-D