Black Flag (1986)

This is were the idea came from: a friend of mine had this brilliant tour poster of Black Flag in his room on which the four band members were drawn as creepy-looking comic figures, looking at you. This poster was so cool. I wanted this image on the back of my black leather jacket. But how should I do this?

This is what I did: I borrowed the poster, made a copy, took a pair of nail scissors and cut away all the white, which was comparatively easy because the image was b/w anyway.

The four figures were standing slightly apart. so I could seperate them, and work on them one by one. I think in the end I glued the four templates on the jacket. I then took some white spaypaint...

Actually, the picture looked absolutely BRILLIANT, and every bit as I had hoped it would. But there was something with the paint... it never really dried on the leather: So I had to be careful not to lean too long at any wall while wearing it, because it came off with a little slurping sound and left tiny white spots. I think after a month or two I gave up on wearing it. But the idea was there.

Henry Rollins and Black Flag. The actual tour poster is nowhere to be found.

Druuna (1987)

In the following year, I came across a godawful Italian comic, but one image stayed in my head. This picture was far more detailed then the Black Flag poster, so there was no way I could use paper and scissors. Sticking to the same general concept, I used thin cardboard on which I glued a strongly enlarged copy of the original picture. The original was approx, 3 x 5 cm. The template was 50 x 70 cm. As far as I can remember, I worked about 2 months on it with stencil knives, mostly in the evenings. I went through 2 - 3 blades per evening, and I had to wear tape around my fingers. It was rather painful. But I still have the template, 22 years later, so the general idea must have been right.

The problem here was: how could I make the template adhere tightly enough to the undergroud so the picture would not come out all blurry, but with these razor-sharp borders between colour and no-colour that I had liked so much about the Black Flag picture? Glue would mean the loss of the template after the first attempt, and just laying it on the canvas (cardboard, actually), produced poor results. The solution was, quite simply, to use needles. I pinned the picture with about 50 needles to the cardboard, and the resulting picture knocked me clean off my feet. I just could not take my eyes off them, and I could not stop making more and more pictures. I have only two left now, gave away the others. Probably my friends thought, this boy must go out more often.

Druuna: Detail from the template

Druuna: Spraypaint / Black cardboard, 50 x 70 cm

Michael Ironside (1988)

This is the most obvious and well-known image I did. The image was so famous that the Green Party cited it in an election.You can watch Mr. Ironside making someone's head explode on Youtube to this date.The original I used was a very small picture from a newspaper. The distortions were massive. It came out well, all in all. I think what I don't like about it is that it is a famous image. I never tried that again.

Originally, I used needles to pin it to the underground, like the previous template. I made this particular picture later, after I had discovered Spray-Mount. Spray-Mount changed everything.

Michael Ironside: Detail from the template

Michael Ironside (50 x 70)

Diamanda Galas (1991)

"You must be certain"

The original line read: You must be certain of the devil. By simply applying my standard 1:14 frame that I needed to blow the image up to 70 x 100 cm, the last three words were cut off and gave the first four words a new meaning, especially when put in context with the Sicilian-looking woman that seems momentarily lost in her own thoughts while leaning against her hand, which holds a gun. Certain of what? I like this one to this date. While I write this, I look at it because it is the only one that hangs on the wall of my room.

Technically, I had to solve the problem of a part of the template that was not connected to the rest of the template (the eye). The solution was of course to keep the surrounding "white" face in one piece and cut out the eye also in one piece. Then I could use the face piece as a "negative" to position the eye correctly on the canvas before spraying. Worked perfectly.

It could not have worked so perfectly unless I hadn't discovered Spray-Mount around that time. It is (or was?) something that is used in architect's or cartographic offices to temporarily stick plans or maps together, and seperate them again.
I still have the template and the face negative, but I lost the eye. Argh!

Diamanda Galas: 70 x 100

Elektra (1991)

"She's out in the open. Were they can see her."

Absolutly. Another comic. The whole image was simple enough, but this time the idea was to get three colours done. So I needed three templates, and I had to think the whole thing through to keep the necessary positive/negative bits of the various templates to be able to shade the different layers when I needed to. I was very pleased with myself at the time and I still think the image has a great expression, but I was also beginning to feel that the whole idea of recreating a small image as perfectly as possible in a larger size was getting boring. Yes, I had proven the point, but nothing else. I started to try things out, like "injuring" the perfect surface directly after spraying, or spraying dots and shadows around the image. I could feel that there was more to this, but I did not know yet how to get to it.

Elektra: Template (one of three)

Elektra: 70 x 100 cm

This work was where I discoved modelmaking paint. There was this little shop which was frequented mostly by middleaged men who had nothing better to do with their spare time then to build little models of WWII  tanks and planes, and me, who only bought the little spray paint cans. Hmmmm.

I knew that I had found something good when I saw the contrasts between the red and black parts of the image. Somehow the borders played tricks on the eye. The colour was thick and heavy (and expensive) and had a crazy, intense quality to it. The only other colour that came close to it was hull paint. O boy. You could almost feel the heavy metal particles settle in your lungs while using it.

Kyra Schon (1991)

This is a very hungry kid. And her parents are stuck with her in the cellar.

Everyone kept saying, aha, you did Jim Morrison, which irritated me considerably.

In this one, I tried a number of things for the first time: highlighting areas (the eye), different colours (the mouth) and double exposure. Especially double exposure lead to results that I found very satisfying at the time. I used the idea, together with other stuff, a great deal in later works.

Kyra Schon: Template

Kyra Schon: 70 x 100

Kyra Schon: Double exposure

Untitled (1991)

This was the last time I did a comic. I tried to push this as far as I could, and be done with it. Today I think I had to get this one out of my system to be able to try out other things.
I filled the space of 70 x 100 cm with as much detail as possible, maybe to test if there would be any limit to this technique, any detail I could not cut out of the cardbord with my stencil knife.

As a piece of craftmansship I can still appreciate it, but as an image it doesn't do anything for me, and somehow I think, it never has. And the reason for it is that there is TOO MUCH detail in it, there is no room for ambiguity and interpretation.

Untitled work: Template

Untitled work: 70 x 100 cm image

Beatrice Dalle (1993)

Now this is where the REAL fun started. Before this template, I was limited to originals that fulfilled two important  prerequisites. They had to be black and white (or no more than one colour) and they had to have sharp contrasts. This meant in effect: they had to be printed. So I could only re-use stuff that had already been put into print by someone else. This was a limitation that I had to overcome, otherwise this way of producing images would soon become a dead end.

What I tried here was to take a picture from the TV screen and use this as an original. If I could make this work, the pool of material available to me would be considerably bigger than it had been before.

This was in 1993, well before the advent of affordable digital photography and DVDs. So the olde VCR had to do a lot of fast-forwarding and rewinding to get to the right frame. And I needed a tripod. But that was all.

Somehow I tried to do all this as lo-tec as possible. The idea was NOT to print an image on a piece of cardboard. I could have done this in a good copy shop. The idea was to dig into the ocean of images, come up with something and NAIL IT DOWN so it could not get away anymore like all the other images. I think this nailing-down part needed to be crude and painful and, well, lo-tec like a hammer. Whatever.

So this was my first template that I did from a photo. I still had to learn that to make this work I had to do some abstraction that previously the printing process had done for me.

All in all, I think it came out well.

Beatrice Dalle: Template

Beatrice Dalle: 50 x 70

Kathleen Kinmont (1993)

This was my second image from a photo that I took off the screen. This is were the bride comes apart in glorious technicolour.

In this image, the use of different colours was necessary because otherwise everything apart from the eye would have been one unrecognizable mass. What I like about it is the balance beween nearly abstract forms and a strong expression. And of course the crazy, glowing colours. The whole image nearly jumps off the wall. I have two of them that look nearly indentical, which I framed and put up the wall of my room side by side. The doubling made it even more intense. I used a more subtle form of double exposure here, for which I used a light white colour with which I created blurry borders, and afterwards the thick, heavy hull paint for the sharp borders. I used hull paint because I needed so much paint, which made modelmaking paint too expensive. Luckily I lived in Kiel at the time, so hull paint was easy to come by.

Kathleen Kinmont: Detail from the template

Kathleen Kinmont (70 x 100 cm)

Jenny Wright (1993)

This is when she decides to give him her kiss, with all the consequences.

For this one, I had to develop a whole set of new techniques out of pure necessity. Once I had finished the template and made the first test, I realized that it did not work. The whole face was one huge area that looked just boring when I sprayed it. So I had to introduce an element of injury to the plain surfaces.

I honestly don't know anymore how I got the idea, but probably I just looked around in my flat for materials that could be of any use, and what I did was: cutting out an approx. 70 x 100 piece of redecoration plane used to cover the furniture when painting walls, ironing it which made it all wrinkly, spraying paint on it and printing it on the canvas with a roller.

First I used this only to get a background for the sprayed image, but it didn't take long until I tried to spray the image itself on plane and print it. Or print it and spray over it. The possibilities were becoming endless.

Jenny Wright: Template

Jenny Wright: 70 x 100, sprayed and printed

Self Portait (1993)

Someone had made this photo of me a few years back. I felt now confident enough to try a "real" person. The first person I tried to make an image from was myself. This was an important leap. Until then, I had made images from other images.  I had chosen the images for what they expressed, and this expresson had been put into the image by someone else before. A photographer, a director, a comic artist.

Looking for images in the real world meant to cross a border. It expressed a certain confidence that I did not posses before. I would not anymore rely on others to print something for me. I would not anymore rely on others to film or shoot something for me. I would not anymore rely on others to express something for me. From now on, I would take ownership of this.

The template came out phantastic, and the images were all I hoped for. Some of my best works come from this template. The idea of placing three images on the same canvas came purely from the fact that the image was too small to fill a 70 x 100 space. I deeply love the three images that are in a progessing state of decay, or madness, or whatever.

Self Portrait: template

Ulrich Sommer: 50 x 70 cm

Self Portrait, three states of disintegration, 70 x 100, variation 1

Self Portrait, three states of disintegration, 70 x 100, variation 2

Gerda Kühn (1994)

Gerda Kühn was an old friend of the familiy, a heirloom of my grandmother. She used to spend christmas with us since I was a kid. She had been a teacher and could tell great stories. The stories tended to be the same stories each christmas, but since she told them so entertaining, no one minded. She also had a well-developed vain streak, so when I asked her, did she mind if I took some photos of her for one of my images, she didn't mind a bit.

When I finished with the template, and did the first images, I thought, wow, I start to become really good at this. Everything I had learned up to this point came together in these images. What also helped was that she was an old person: lots of wrinkles meant lots of life meant lots of connections on the template.

Half a year after finishing this one, I got a job offer from Ireland. I took some photos with me that I planned to work on while being there. It took me well over a year to finish the following works, mainly because other things were more important for me now, but also because it proved to be incredibly difficult to find the right materials.

In hindsight, this job offer interrupted the run I had had, and it would take me 15 years to pick it up again.

Gerda Kühn: Template

Gerda Kühn (70 x 100 cm): From a nice old lady...

...to an image of death.

Melinda Clarke (1995)

Template: Melinda Clarke (1). Size 70 x 100 cm

This unfortunate girl just had a serious motorcycle accident and now her boyfried is afraid of her and she is SO hungry.

The originals were again movie stills. So, again, the image that came out in the end is somewhat an abstraction or iconisation of the original.

Some things worked well with this one. I found a very robust template material that WASN'T cardboard (which was so hard to work with). It was a kind of plastic that was easy to cut, but did not tear. These different properties of the material give the template a kind of Tiffany-Glass look that I like very much.

Some things did not work. There was only useless spraypaint in the whole of Ireland (I suppose no one builds model tanks and planes there, hence no little REVELL cans are available...), and the pictures came out dull and disappointing.

Upon moving back to Germany I made some tests, but never really picked up the art again. Too much work to do.  I still want to try out silk screen, there is still so much to discover.  Ah well. The time will come.

Template: Melinda Clarke (2). Size 70 x 100 cm

Template: Melinda Clarke (3). Size 70 x 100 cm

What was the point?

Was it the tape around my fingers against the pain? Was it the excruciatingly boring work that went on for weeks and weeks? Knowing that what I was working on for the last hour or two where mostly specks that were the result of the distortions introduced into the original during the enlargement process. Cutting out all the white, and only the white like a crazy robot, trying to add to or omit from the template as little as possible, act as brainless as possible, was definitely part of "the point". Creating something but not being present while doing it.

I remember the fascination when I discovered by pure chance what happened when light fell through the template. The template gave away nothing, only spots and dots, I had my face only centimetres over it while cutting away the white with a stencil knife, so I did not see the whole thing, but when light fell through it, I saw a perfect eye, cheekbone, hand, lock of hair... I could not get enough from holding up the cardboard and focus the light on different parts of it, watching the images on the walls of my room at night. Sometimes I thought, this is even better than the spraypaint. But it is only light, I can not make it stay.

The regret: I never put one of my works on a wall at night. I should have.

And of course: Being totally dumbstruck with awe after spraying the first picture from a finished template. Nothing compares to it. Trying to make the template adhere as tightly as possible to the canvas to get these razor-sharp borders between colour and no-colour. Finding out the beauty of shadows, of colour bleeding like light into the dark areas, came later.