DRAWING
Though I had a solid drawing education during high school and liked it quite a lot, I seldom used it until the end of the seventies. During a discussion with a friend of school and university we had the idea to start again with drawing. Full of expectations we went to the town and looked for places where we could make drawings. For both it was quite important to find places where nobody could look over our shoulders! We expected every possible comment. Slowly we got accustomed that nearly nobody paid any attention to our efforts.
For years I went to the central railway station of Basel or into the surrounding restaurants and sketched persons. I discovered that beyond 3 metres nobody paid attention to me. This training helped me later to catch quickly the overall impression of my surroundings and produce fast sketches.
Drawing was and stayed a pure free time occupation. I do not remember having made drawings as a form of relaxation. This was reserved for sculpturing. At the beginning, I had great difficulties doing water colours.
It took quite some time and much exercise to detach myself from sketching and start combining colours into impressions. The more I removed myself from a landscape impression and tried painting days or weeks later, the better I was pleased with my results
Today I make most drawings by hatching or with very fast strokes. I like to paint monochrome with Japanese ink in different concentrations. Quite often I take a handy sketching book and train myself in “minute-sketching”. Doing this, I try to catch a situation or a person in its entity and to express it in few strokes.