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SW: How did you get into art and what were your first artistic inspirations? FS: When I was younger, I really liked Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet – simple images one might think – but when you see them in the flesh they are really powerful. I came across William Blake at an early stage, he's probably the artist who has meant the most to me and still does. I got into art through an interest in music, I collected records and like many other teenagers I searched for a creative outlet. I was drawn to the record sleeves and I'm probably not the only visual artist from my generation who started there. J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy about the ring was important for me, it was a reading experience I still remember as one of the most meaningful and significant. He managed to create his own world, a place where time and space disappeared. These early encounters have clearly shaped me. SW: What are your thoughts about your serial work? The Der Traum-works and Meditation-paintings, for example. FS: The execution of the Der Traum-series, especially the larger works, certainly contains a performative element. These images were challenging to paint because I found it difficult to determine when a picture was complete or what was up or down. I've thought a lot about the anthroposophical world view and Rudolf Steiner's own pictures, there is a method behind it that looks so uninhibited. Several of the images in the Der Traum-suite were parts of diptychs consisting of contrasting motifs, the series with Carl Gustav Jung's houses, which were very controlled and deliberate in their execution. I'm impatient and have great difficulty limiting my range of expressions, expressions that are often parallel to each other and intertwine in an exhibition or in a book. I started working with Meditation-paintings when I lived in Beijing in 2008. Feeling isolated I often visited the Tibetan and Taoist temples there. It affected me deeply – the images are exercises in concentration, they are sealed and closed, yet open to other spaces. SW: How do you feel about colour theories? Do you use the older teachings in your own work, Goethe's colour theory, for example, and have you been influenced by Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art? Or have you created your own creative set of rules and symbol dictionary in your work? FS: I haven't been preoccupied with colour theories in a long time; I prefer to develop my own system. What is important for me is the quality of the colours and how they are composed. Many of my images contain real pigment, and it raises a reverence for the painting when I use these generally costly materials, like when you apply gold leaf. Care and accuracy are more important to me than colour teachings – and much is made with intuitively. I never had any specific relationship with Kandinsky or the book Concerning the Spiritual in Art. I also never had any interest in musicality in painting, my pictures are mute, they are not supposed to sway or sing. For me, the artists Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman and Blinky Palermo have been more important – artists that probably don't immediately spring to mind when you see my work. SW: What does magic mean to you? FS: The word magic is derived from the Greek word Mega meaning great, which really suits art, as art is, at its best, great. Magic merges the physical world with the spiritual world. My artistic work has some features in common with alchemy, the refinement process. I often use pigments from the mineral kingdom and the plant kingdom along with other natural materials in my pictures, such as gold and silver leaf. The internal powers present in the material are transferred to the aura of the finished artwork. In Chinese alchemy and daoism the inner and the outer is divided into Neidan and Weidan, Neidan cultivates and strengthens the resources that are within us. Weidan is the resources that are outside of our body in the form of extracts, elixirs, and in my view, it can also be in the form of colour and pigment. The goal was often to produce the elixir of life that was based on the mineral cinnabar (mercury) which when used as an ingredient in paint, is called vermilion, a bright reddish orange colour. It is also about art as a tool to transform and reach enlightenment – to achieve transcendence. |
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