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Juni 2022

 

- Where The Poppy Blooms -

Claudia, a camerawoman by profession, met me, the painter, on the first Sunday in June to shoot a little clip of me painting. For my part, I brought along my large field easel and a finished landscape painting with poppies, for her part she contributed various cameras and her new drone. We drove north from Berlin – not south, where Claudia had already spotted some poppy fields near Leipzig. I had painted my poppy field at Chorin Monastery and wanted to shoot the clip at the same spot. But when I arrived there, there were no poppies to be seen far and wide. Did it simply need a little longer to blossom further north? Finally. At the side of the road we actually saw the first and only colourful flowers on the spot, including poppies. Without a doubt, we had to seize this opportunity. I sat down with my back to the road and began to paint a new flower picture while Claudia filmed the process of creation. "Come on," she suggested, "now we'll do the shoot with the drone while we're at it."

We turned down a dirt road and drove to a spot somewhat sheltered from the wind. There I brought my easel with the large poppy field painting into position, put on my straw hat and pretended to paint. Claudia let her beautiful big drone circle above us, fly in low, then climb up again. We found this action funny. Even today we both have to laugh when we think of our little masterpiece of filming the creation of a poppy field painting without a poppy field. A week later, the fields here in the north would also bloom in bright red, that was already clear to us. But at that moment we followed Dante's advice: one man waits for time to change, the other grasps it vigorously and acts.

Poppies make you stupid? Claudia and I proved the opposite – and made a virtue out of necessity. The first little film with the flowers at the roadside was already perfect in my view, but the second one of painting the poppy field "to be" was simply ingenious. Because doesn't every artist love to play with illusion?


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