How did living in a caravan across the US shape you as an artist, what led to your transition into Berlin art sphere?
Traveling across the U. S. I involved myself in a lot of different art communities and creating community art. I did a free community theatre for a while where I designed the set for the stage for eight week run every week designing and doing it all out of reused materials and found objects.
So that was a real treat, fun way to express my creativity. Also doing installation product projects around Burning Man festival, every year for seven years was really involved with an art group there. And while on the road, I also stimulated my creativity in a lot of different ways: I created my own clothing and did leather work all around.
While also like drawing. I involved myself whatever way I could to just try to keep that creative energy going that was always in me. I needed to stimulate it. And whenever I came to Berlin, I started to paint and wondering about what I'm going to do in Berlin to create my life here. And suddenly it just dawned on me one day that I would continue to paint also about the time that the pandemic came. I isolated and painted. Continuously for a long time and I drew all my inspiration from my experiences and my living in the countryside and traveling. These metaphors would just kind of come up to the surface for me and that fed a lot of my work and informed what I'm doing. So my creative process is very messy and it's very impulsive.
What does your creative process look like, and what drew you to tools like palette knives and squeegees?
I follow my intuition whenever I paint and I don't really try to think about anything too much about how I'm going to build the painting up or how each mark will be translated. I really feed of the chaos and organizing that with this kind of impulsiveness. I don't actually use tools whenever I paint very much.
I use a brush and I use my hands. This also allows me to be really in contact with the medium and be really involved with my painting. Like I said, I'm quite messy: I'm getting paint all over myself, I'm splashing paint, I'm throwing paint. And this kind of feeds my work in a way that it shows an immediacy that I appreciate in work. It shows painterly quality that I appreciate in people's work. And whenever I think about things too much or I try to organize things, then I'm not very satisfied with the outcome. I feel it's looking very contrived and unnatural.
Could you share what visitor can expect from your upcoming duo exhibition “Die Wilde Blüte: The Untamed Growth” at Galerie Sara Lily Perez
What people will see is this kind of like storytelling through nature. And that's what I think both me and Gabriela are doing. Her work evokes a much more peaceful side of nature and mine is wilder side of nature. So that kind of contrast in that storytelling is very interesting, how we're both using the same source material, but finding a different way to express that.People will see a very interesting show as our pieces speak to each other and relate to each other.
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