BACK IN TUNISIA

Just want to inform my readers that I am back in my studio room in Tunisia. It feels so good and calm, so my inspiration is back. What more I have to say ? Hmmm...stay healthy and take care, my dear reader and (hopefully) fan 🙂

MY SIGNATURE STYLE

It is normal that the drawing style of an artist is compared to someone else who is more well-known or famous. So I was often asked whether I drew the inspiration to develop my style from George Seurat, the famous French pointillist, or from Gustav Klimt for example.

No, not from them. I even didn't know them when I started. My favourite more modern painters are Salvador Dali and Vincent van Gogh, and to a certain extend Pablo Picasso.

When I started my first efforts at surreal pointillism, I thought about Dali's surreal painting style, about Picasso's deformed faces, but much more than that about our

Classical Tunisian Henna Painting

which comes natural to me because it was part of my childhood in Tunisia. Tunisian families are extensive. Every family celebrates a wedding of a close or distant relative or a neighbour every single summer. And every wedding has a special day for the ladies: the Henna Night. As a little boy I accompanied my mother to those Henna Nights. Every lady had painted her special festive design on hands and feet. .

I was living in Germany when I started serious painting with ink and feather pen. It all began with patterns on paper, then forms of pottery and people, and then the notion hit me that women often look like vases in traditional North African clothes.

After many emptied bottles of ink, and lots of paper which had ended up in the paper basket, in 1983, the relatively small painting "FATIMA'S HAND" combined all aspects and defined my drawing style which is my signature style to the day.

SALVADOR AND GALA

I were in our early Twenties, it was in about 1976, when we watched a television documentary about the Spanish painter Salvador Dali and his wife "Gala". Although having had been admirers of the painter's genial artwork for a long time, we were surprised to learn some aspects of their life together which we hadn't known before. We wanted to learn more.

Young people today enjoy the advantage of having masses of information available from the Internet but the two of us back then had to go to a book store to buy ourselves another book on the subject. The book we bought was talking about how much his wife Gala contributed to the "DALI brand" as it would be called in modern words. She had to offer what he wanted and needed in a woman. She was his MUSE, manager, model, confidante.

Gala was actually a Russian from Kazan and 10 years older than him. The fact that the couple was rooted in two different nations and had very different backgrounds adds another very interesting flavour to their lovestory. They both were not particularly young when they married. He was 30 years old, she was already 40, an age in which a woman in that time had to be a mindblowing beauty or the mother of his children to be prestigious for a rich and successful man like Salvador. Propably many a psychologist or journalist were betting on such a marriage to end fast in certain divorce. Nevertheless Salvador and Gala made it to a very long marriage of 48 years (1934 to 1982) which ended only with Gala's death at the old age of 88 years.

https://www.dailyartmagazine.coom/dali-gala-great-love-story/

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/07/10/when-your-muse-is-also-a-demonic-dominatrix/

Young artlovers of the 1970s and 1980s like us were big fans of Salvador Dali, although over time there were a lot of disturbing newspaper stories about Salvador and Gala. Excentric behavior by Dali in public produced excentric press coverage. Propably they just knew what it takes to be real celebrities. But true fans stand by their idols.

Finally in 1990 while holidaying in Spain with our children, we went to Figueres to show us and them the Dali Museum. Salvador and Gala were long gone by that time but we still felt their auras present around us there and in Cadaques where they used to own a villa.

https://www.salvador-dali.org/en/museums/dali-theatre-museum-in-figueres/

https://www.salvador-dali.org/en/museums/house-salvador-dali-in-portlligat/

Artists need their MUSES

- no doubt.