The high format
When I was a guest student at the Düsseldorf Art Academy during my sabbatical year in 2004/2005, I finally had the time and leisure again to deal intensively with painting.
(That was the only advantage at the art school, by the way, because the professors there don’t really help the student. If they show up once every few weeks and take a quick look at the students’ pictures, only comments like “is O.K.” or “that sucks”,…)
I decided to break new ground for myself. While my pictures usually started out from a rather small spatial stage, on which mostly one figure acted without any physical background, now several figures in the picture should act together. For this it was necessary to expand the narrow spatial stage. But instead of following the students’ usual path of more or less juxtaposing the figures, I was interested in the third spatial dimension, the depth of the pictorial space.
I therefore decided to choose an extreme portrait format,
With a width of 80 cm but a height of 230 cm, the viewer stands so close to the picture in a normal-sized living room that he has to look up and down to see it in its entirety. The perspective of the pictures follows this specification; Within the picture, there is a change from the normal view to a bird’s or frog’s eye view. When looking at the picture, there is a pull into the depths of the room.
Here are some examples:
Video explanations for the high format images (Linked to YouTube - Google's privacy policy applies):