Painting Art Textiles

"Painting and textiles Painting is the freest of all the arts. Forms and colors play across the surface, forming a fabric whose diversity is infinite; its essence is not boundaries, but a thousandfold network of interconnections."

Theodor Hetzer: Bild als Bau

"I give you the end of a golden thread,

Just wind it into a ball:

It will lead you to the gates of heaven,

Built into the walls of Jerusalem."

William Blake, Jerusalem

What draws me to painting is the same thing that fascinates me about textile art: the search for a universal, understandable language beyond words—one that I can develop with the help of my eyes, my mind, and my heart, and that is created through materials, through working with my hands, and through time.

Painting is a quiet, almost fleeting act in which the material is transformed into visual phenomena. Color and surface play a major role.

With fibers and textiles, the use of my materials becomes concrete. I take fabrics in my hands that I can use to design, spin, weave, sew, embroider, and appliqué. Color, materiality, surface, and space play a major role.

Spectrum Flower Garden, Hommage to Hassan Sharif

During my art studies and in the years that followed, I devoted myself intensively to painting, with a particular interest in oil painting. Among other things, I was fascinated by the fact that the appearance of the pigments during the painting process with oil as a binder does not change in relation to the result, which is not the case with water-soluble binders.

After graduating from the Städelschule, I moved with my family to Madrid, where I was able to study the old masters at the Prado – starting with Titian, whom Manet called the “father of painting.” What I learned in particular from Titian, but also from Rubens and Goya, who all referred to Titian, concerned not only the layered structure of painting—the separation of color and form—but also the alchemy of colors—the essence and handling of pigment as the smallest unit of material, its ethereal character that seems to float between matter and gravity. In Titian's work, the image carrier and the visible image become one; the figures seem to emerge from the canvas and sink back into it. If you allow yourself to be drawn into his painting, you can experience humanity in all its grandeur and transience. Titian achieves this through his painting—through the distribution of pigments and their relationships to one another, and not through the illustration of content.

Adam and Eve Dress - Felicity Brown

Textile Pigment Cut

For several years now, I have been devoting a large part of my time to researching, learning, and teaching textile practices—out of curiosity, but also because I find great joy in doing so: a sense of calm and concentration in which I feel connected to the world and to people.

When I pick up fibers, threads, and fabrics, it is as if I am holding the ethereal presence of the pigments themselves in my hands—a way of understanding the world through the sense of touch. It is a little like taking the pigments directly into my hands and working with them on the surface (and in space).

Textile handicrafts are much more than a craft process. As with any art form, their products can be visual inventions and convey abstract content. In any case, they are a quiet but powerful chapter in our human history. The authors of this story are women – women who often worked in private and domestic settings and created, preserved, and passed on knowledge across generations. They refined techniques, networked, entertained their families, and shaped our lives with loving creativity.

They worked with what nature provided them and, over time, they explored the inherent possibilities to their fullest extent. It began, for example, with small bones, which were turned into needles with just a few simple steps; flax was first transformed into cord, then woven with finer threads, and much later also used for bobbin lace; pigments were extracted from plants, small animals, earth, and stones. The list of manifestations within textile art, to which I subsume fiber material, is endless.

If we look around, we see traces everywhere of a cultural practice that is thousands of years old and has developed in every corner of the world. History resonates in every technique, in every material. And what at first glance seems inconspicuous turns out, on closer inspection, to be applied world knowledge.

Head & Heart Quilt

As in every artistic field, there are specific basic conditions that I, as an artist, respond to and react to. Soon I will meet with Felicity to discuss these basic conditions in detail. I'm looking forward to it!