My creative 
journey

Having worked for decades as a designer and creative director, I use my skills of conceptual expression, composition, color, aesthetics and materials, yet allow myself to roam freely in often unexpected territories, and so I developed this fascination with organic art.

 

I work nowadays with wool, vintage linens and fabrics, jute, seeds and dried flowers, beeswax and several organic types of paint and glue. (Sometimes I also grab a can of spray paint, layer wax on top and then merge and diffuse the layers with an iron...) Through these media, I am exploring the space where impressionism and abstract expressionism meet. For me, these art movements reflect our outer and inner nature, which I want to merge – and organic fiber is my ideal medium to weave them together.  

 

While referencing nature, and using natural materials, I am interested in creating meaning through emotions, aiming to spark energy, positivity and joy, but also depth and contrast. I want to create a natural presence of energy in many hues, and the natural structure and motion of all these fibers express, and conserve, the spectacle of being alive.

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Painting with organic materials requires a fresh way of seeing, to translate the imagined into a composition that is transformed like alchemy into its final form through a fairly complex and very physical technique I developed myself. Layers of color, form and direction move, merge and melt into substance. Compositions emerge, drawn with soft organic fibers and turned into a one of a kind, dynamic, colorful, warm and natural medium with a very unique organic texture. 

 

I literally dance on my dry fiber sketches, using a veil over the artwork, and saturating it with just the right amount of soap water,  to merge the fibers into a substance of its own. This process can take days to weeks. The energy of creating it is visually embedded in each work, through the weaving of the fibers in different textures and colors.  The result can be seen and touched, as it touches us with its organic nature.
 

Painting with natural fibers is also sustainable art – the medium is the message, and my work calls attention to preventing wool from becoming waste (sheep wool is an underused resource, and 90% of it are thrown away each year). ​The wool I use is natural sheep wool, hand dyed in many vibrant shades, sometimes mixed with silk, cotton yarn, bamboo fiber, seeds and alpaka wool from animals I know by first name. I also experiment with beeswax, paint, second hand fabrics, glitter and even flour as special touches and finishes. 

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Artists who touch me, and therefore my work, include Joseph Beuys, Joan Mitchell, Anselm Kiefer, Franziska Reinbothe, Mary Heilmann, and, of course, Joseph Albers, Gerhard Richter, and Mark Rothko.