Fritz Engelhardt

It’s not a plan that drives me to paint but the eagerness and will to create something with the expectation that a picture will present itself that says something about the beauty of nature and the experience of nature.

This is the reason landscape painting is a central focus in my work.

The starting point for a picture is always an instantaneous experience of nature in the form of a sketch, watercolor study and a landscape photo.

For me, the hundreds of landscape photos archived in the form of slides and paper prints have a function that gives the artist support and discipline.

By transferring the model as exactly as possible, I avoid the temptation to change proportions and details and to harmonize the cropping according to the rules of composition.

The coloring work and changes to the motif that conclude the work process lead to a new reality and a new truth beyond the photographic snapshot.

Just like the instantaneous capturing of the photo, my landscapes are also only analogies of the excerpt of nature.

Although I design the motifs as faithfully as possible to the photographic model, the paintings acquire additional qualities that distinguish them from their models.

Because of the change in the medium and the increased format size, the painting acquires a different, more intensive presence than the photographic representation possesses.

A picture has more reality than a photo because it has more of the character of an object, because it’s been visibly painted by hand, i.e. was tangibly produced with materials.

While a photographic rendering always emphasizes the moment, a situation or records an event, a painting is still within a tradition of art history that immediately transcends every motif and therefore makes it seem timeless and universally valid.

It has more reality than a photo because a painting has more of the character of an object, because it’s tangibly produced with materials.

My landscapes always show only one excerpt from nature as it in fact corresponds to visible reality but not to the truth of our present time.

The truth is different.

By selecting the motif and therefore precisely what the artistic resolution of the details do not show, all landscapes are intuitive models of a lost truth and reality.

The desire of human beings for a healthy and ecologically intact environment leads me also to the strangely ambivalent position of a late Romanticist who wants to paint something beautiful with impressionistic tools and being committed to modern humanity at the same time.

Quotation:

What a painting presents is not necessarily what is there.

It is what can incessantly occupy our minds because it only appears in its own way.

The decision as to whether a work of art is successful cannot be made by anyone other than the one doing the work.  

Whether this is so, that is a question he need not answer.

                                                                         Matthias Tripp