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July 2024

- Mountain World -

Aren't mountains wonderful motifs for a plein air painter? They don't run away, they don't sway in the wind, they are simply stable, unlike waves and clouds. No wonder I was so keen to finally travel to the Alps to paint panoramic pictures and mountain massifs, the Zugspitze, the Watzmann and other giants of the mountain world at lofty heights. On my first painting trip, the mountains disappeared from the very first day in the misty veil of constant rain. On my second attempt, the clouds hung so low that without the sun, the landscape remained devoid of contrast and colour. Our third trip was finally under a favourable star. In the sunshine, it wasn't just the tall spruce trees that glowed in a dark and the mountain meadows in a bright, lush green. The mountain massifs also had a strong presence of colour and stood out clearly in their light grey against the blue of the almost cloudless sky. They shimmered here in anthracite, there in violet, interspersed with olive green, pink and brownish colour fields. My husband and I had made a plan for this eventuality a long time ago, and now we could put it into practice. We would simply travel around and I would paint a new motif in a different place every day.

Up to this point, mountains had also epitomised stability and immutability for me. As soon as I started painting, I realised that the supposedly smooth rock surfaces were an illusion. Cracks, crevices, ledges and slopes disappeared, only to reappear elsewhere. In the shifting sunlight, the rock was sometimes in the light, sometimes in the shade. I kept discovering new lines and edges, everywhere the shapes of huge slopes and deep gorges that had been invisible just a short time before. I felt challenged by the mountains and it was not easy to find my way in this stable and yet visually so changeable world. Every day and with every new motif, I felt like a summiteer and every picture made me happy, as if I had achieved a miraculous feat without any physical effort.

Everyone realises that mountains are not just big, but magnificent. I have known since this third trip to the Alps that they can cast a magical spell over me. But just as for a mountaineer, a sudden change in the weather is a big problem for a plein air painter. So our excursions into the mountains ended earlier than planned. When the peaks disappeared into the cloudy haze for a long time, we gave up and returned to the lowlands. At least there we could be sure that the weather would only shake our umbrellas, but not our sense of adventure and my desire to paint.

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