S1 – Frohnau

Winter of ´21.
A job takes me to the far edge of Berlin at regular intervals.

I take the S-bahn 1 in the direction of Frohnau twice a week. I go to the very external street in the west part where the outer border wall between the GDR and DDR stood.

A good hour on the S-bahn. The stops gradually encrust my brain: Humboldthain, Gesundbrunnen, Friedrichstrasse, Bornholmerstrasse…. each station a pause, each stop a piece of landscape carved out between the houses that runs fast at the window, kilometres of escarpments, bread for my teeth or rather for my eyes.

Each image a mental photo, thousands of mental photos in a year, stations in opposite lights, night/day, summer/winter, yellow, grey, white. Each stage its own atmosphere, each station its own personality.
After a year of chewing them all up, a series of fifteen works, small formats,  oil painting on wood boards, came out.     My versions of each station.

And this is how it always happens to me. Very rarely I do paint plein air.  Most of the time, months of observing blossom onto the outside world through the prism of my perception and settle on canvas or wood.

LF