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What fascinates me how is the earth, in the various forms of
its landscape and stones, assumes different Material and color
qualities, how the variegated layers tell stories about the
creation of the earth, about the conditions under which peopie live
in different parts of the earth, as well as the interplay between
climatic zones and vegetation.The quality of the earth determines
the quality of the landscape. It is a contributory factor for the
architecture that people construct in the respective landscapes. In
addition, the earth provides the basis for the production of
colors, with which man develops his image of the world. In
mysticism too and among all peoples the earth is assigned a
particular significance: earth is primary materials, conveyor of
energy; earth means beginning and end.
- Ulrike Arnold
In remote places on the Colorado Plateau, Ulrike Arnold, a
German artist of international renown, creates works on canvas that
convey a journalistic record and a sense of place, using not words
but the materials at hand: the earth itself, the stuff of which the
landscape around her is made. She creates her works on site, out of
doors, and they capture with remarkable power a great deal about
the place that surrounds her as she works.Working on a piece of
canvas which may be twenty feet long and six feet wide, Ulrike lays
down colors that are not pigments but bits of soil, earth, Sand,
mud, and crushed rock". I try to get the essence of a place," she
says, and there is much detail in her painting. Her works have to
do with color, but Ulrike also captures the structure and texture
of the land where she paints. "It's all a matter of scale, you
know; there is little in the big, and big in the little." She is
inspired by the structure of the rocks, or the surface of a tree,
all of the patterns and textures of nature which are, in
themselves, abstract images to most of us.Ulrike Arnold's approach
is an emotional rather than an intellectual one. And while her
works effectively convey a sense of place, they are impressionistic
and personal. Like written journals, they reveal as much about the
person who creates them as they do about the place in which they
are created.Ulrike calls herself an "earth artist" or "earth
painter," apt descriptions of the style in which she has worked for
nearly twenty years. Born in Dusseldorf, she came to her craft
first as a teacher of music and art. Most of her early creative
work was done in pencil. She was drawn to the shadows of gray, the
lines, the absence of artificial color. Then in 1980 she traveled
to Provence, in France, where she visited the red ochre pits near
Roussillion. It was a turning point in her life. She returned to
her studio in Wuppertal with a small bit of that red earth.
Today Ulrike works entirely without a studio, and without
artificial pigments. She has worked throughout the world, on every
continent, often traveling alone, drawn to landscapes of startling
beauty. She has worked in Algeria, Madagascar, Iceland, Armenia,
and Australia, in the Canary Islands, and throughout the American
Southwest. As she explores a new place, she asks, 'What happened
here thousands of years ago? Who lived here?" Her connection is not
only with landscape but with the cultural heritage of the land, or
as she calls it, "the spiritual meaning of landscape." Ulrike puts
it most eloquently when she says, "Here must have been something
special."
The most excltlng place Ulrike ever worked was Ruby Gorge, in
central Australia. In that remote place on her birthday in 1987,
camping alone for the first time in her life, she transferred her
feelings of fear, anxiety, joy, and excitement to the canvas. For
herworks, like most creative works of music or literature, are an
outlet for loneliness, pain, suffering, and joy. No one who knows
Ulrike or her work can doubt that joy is the predominant
emotion.
Like the landscape itself, Ulrike's works are untitled and
unframed, bearing only the names of the geographic locations where
they were created and from which their earth paints derived. They
are on display in galleries and museums throughout the world, the
heavy, textured canvases loosely suspended from walls or spread
horizontally on gallery floors.
In june 1999 Ulrike will exhibit at the Ludwigforum in Aachen,
Germany. The show focuses on the relationship between nature and
culture and will feature earth paintings of some twenty artists.
For this venue Ulrike is preparing seven pieces, each twenty feet
long and five feet wide. Each painting represents a separate
location in the American Southwest, including San Francisco Wash,
near Flagstaff, Bisbee, Arizona; the Burr Trall in Utah; Luna Mesa,
near Capitol Reef National Park, Utah; Galisteo, New Mexico; and
Guadalupe Ranch, in southern New Mexico.
In North America, Ulrike's work will be on display in August 1999
at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art in Logan, Utah. There her
works will be shown along with those of Mario Reis, a German artist
who works with water. Ulrike feels strongly that her works are more
than mode of expression for the artist, more than a journal of her
own feelings. They are done as a kind of mission, to inspire the
viewer with feelings similar to those which she herself feels in
places of overwhelming beauty. Viewers of her work will sometimes
exclaim, "Can these colors be real, do they really exist in
nature?" And Ulrike is delighted with the written comments she
receives along these lines: "You have opened my eyes to see the
earth differently." Like the journals of Dave Edwards, Ulrike's
works are meant for others to read.Since 1991 Ulrike has
experirmented with painting directly on rock surfaces, first at the
Crestone Zen Monastery in Colorado, later at the Christ in the
Desert Monastery in Abiquiu, New Mexico, always on private land and
only by invitation. Inspired by prehistoric rock art she has seen
throughout the world, Ulrike feels her own earth works are places
of "homage to creation, to nature." These works, sometimes
carefully hidden in alcoves or niches, are always executed with a
sensitivity to both the land and the people. She studiously avoids
public land and sacred places. Like all her works, these works are
created using only the natural materials she finds on site.Ulrike
hopes that her works invite a new vision of both the ordinary and
the extraordinary, that they foster a sense of caring and
stewardship toward the places they celebrate. They are her response
to those places throughout the world where the landscape is so
remarkable, so startling, that words fail most of us in our
attempts at description. Language will not serve us in our attempt
to convey the power and glory of these places. The Colorado Plateau
is one such place, and Ulrike Arnold has proven herself equal to
that task, creating works that are an inspriation to all of us
lucky enough to know them.
(by L.Greer Price orginally appeared in Plateau Journal
magazine,
puplished jointly by Grand Canyon Assoction and the Museum of
Northern Arizona)
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