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February 2023

- Tropical Night -

When we are celebrating a new year in Germany, other nations are still in preparations for New Year's Eve. I would have loved to have spent the turn of the year 1999-2000 on the Polynesian archipelago of Samoa, to be one of the last people to say goodbye to the 20th century on the northwest cape of the island of Savaiʻi. For this was where the International Date Line ran at the time. It was not until New Year's Eve 2011 that Samoa's calendar was shifted west of the International Date Line and thus adjusted in the direction of New Zealand. In the South Seas, the clocks were changed from 29 to 31 December. Since then, the sun officially rises first in Samoa.

 

Time is fixed and flexible at the same time. At home in Berlin, I am a night owl. But in Savaiʻi, my sense of time changes immediately. Here I go to bed shortly after sunset and get up with the chickens. On the spot, I had the idea for a beautiful painting motif. In the short phase between night and dawn, when behind dark grey clouds a shimmer between red and orange bathed the sky in a delicate light, the stars still twinkled above in blue-black darkness. But the silhouettes of palm trees, papaya trees and banana plants already stood out so clearly from the horizon that they were easily paintable. The sea thundered on the nearby reef, the waves lapped on the beach and the village roosters crowed in many voices as the day approached. The time between brush strokes passed quickly. As the sky illuminated in bright yellow and turquoise, the plant silhouettes also took shape and colour. The day had arrived – and my work on the painting was actually finished. The fact that the motif title did not become 'Tropical Morning' but 'Tropical Night' is due to the fact that a few days later, inspired by a new idea, I simply washed off the indigo blue of the silhouettes, painted the night sky with full moon over the still visible contours and then filled in the pale recognisable outlines of the plants with indigo again.

 

Just as one does not want to decide exactly whether the day begins or ends in Samoa, I myself do not know whether I would prefer to assign the painting to the day or the night. On the dateline, one simply feels timeless and so this painting stands somewhere between yesterday and today, today and tomorrow – and speaks for itself.


 

> order magnetic bookmark motif  'Tropical Night'