Carola Schapals
Nature
In my perception of nature – the remote forest, the building plots, fallow industrial sites, the disorderly wilderness and the profile of a shoreline – play important roles.
For me, this is where reality and fiction blend into each other.
When I go there, where the roads end, when I am in the “off”, then I am at places of longing.
When the silence there swallows me up.
Then I am apart from light and shadow reflections in the midst of the rich vegetation.
I am searching for the magic of these often hidden places, as well as their ability to exist beyond time. Somewhere in this tangled chaos of vegetative figures, shapes and lines, spaces and darkness existing outside limits of logic, I sense there are places of long gone happenings.
There is something very big and very old.
I always paint nature.
Architecture
Architecture becomes my painting theme, if it stylistically has a clarity of form and surface and thus stands out in strong contrast to the vegetation surrounding it. Architecture is order.
I am inspired by the aesthetics of the functional practical formal language of classical modernism.
I also love the architectural design of the early James Bond films as well as the layout of the bungalows from the 50s and 60s of the last century.
My fictions about these architectures deal with their individual atmosphere and history, their utilization and their likely inhabitants. The things behind. These interpretations flow into my painting through an appropriate color palette, a concealment or an omission.
Portraits of houses surrounded by nature are standing in my work as a substitute for “presence of man” in the area of tension between significance and banality.
In the studio
For me painting means a constant balancing – from the realization of my intuition and pictorial intention to my current painting theme.
One goal is to create a very specific mood in the painting. Usually I work in my studio, but when I am traveling I like to work plein – air.
Phases of concrete depiction and abstraction are always changing. In doing so, I like to manipulate natural phenomena like watery color traces on the canvas and try to integrate picturesque coincidences in my work.
When I notice while painting that I missed the moment of stopping time, I have doubts, also about the relevance of my work. The painting process is blocked. The feeling of having lost the connection to the painting and having failed then follows. This is the low point. Break. Carry on painting.
There are also some works that almost paint themselves and at the end of the painting process have everything that I intend.
Runners-of –themselves that can withstand my criticism even after weeks and years.
These are my highlights.
In my perception of nature – the remote forest, the building plots, fallow industrial sites, the disorderly wilderness and the profile of a shoreline – play important roles.
For me, this is where reality and fiction blend into each other.
When I go there, where the roads end, when I am in the “off”, then I am at places of longing.
When the silence there swallows me up.
Then I am apart from light and shadow reflections in the midst of the rich vegetation.
I am searching for the magic of these often hidden places, as well as their ability to exist beyond time. Somewhere in this tangled chaos of vegetative figures, shapes and lines, spaces and darkness existing outside limits of logic, I sense there are places of long gone happenings.
There is something very big and very old.
I always paint nature.
Architecture
Architecture becomes my painting theme, if it stylistically has a clarity of form and surface and thus stands out in strong contrast to the vegetation surrounding it. Architecture is order.
I am inspired by the aesthetics of the functional practical formal language of classical modernism.
I also love the architectural design of the early James Bond films as well as the layout of the bungalows from the 50s and 60s of the last century.
My fictions about these architectures deal with their individual atmosphere and history, their utilization and their likely inhabitants. The things behind. These interpretations flow into my painting through an appropriate color palette, a concealment or an omission.
Portraits of houses surrounded by nature are standing in my work as a substitute for “presence of man” in the area of tension between significance and banality.
In the studio
For me painting means a constant balancing – from the realization of my intuition and pictorial intention to my current painting theme.
One goal is to create a very specific mood in the painting. Usually I work in my studio, but when I am traveling I like to work plein – air.
Phases of concrete depiction and abstraction are always changing. In doing so, I like to manipulate natural phenomena like watery color traces on the canvas and try to integrate picturesque coincidences in my work.
When I notice while painting that I missed the moment of stopping time, I have doubts, also about the relevance of my work. The painting process is blocked. The feeling of having lost the connection to the painting and having failed then follows. This is the low point. Break. Carry on painting.
There are also some works that almost paint themselves and at the end of the painting process have everything that I intend.
Runners-of –themselves that can withstand my criticism even after weeks and years.
These are my highlights.
