My grandfather had had stomach cancer. I never met him, he died over 10 years before I was born. And over a few years of suffering – until he died during post war Germany (in the Fifties) – he was at home doing stuff. Or so it was reported. It must have been then that he sat down to paint trees, making up forests, in pain staking detail. He also carved frames for these paintings.
I grew up around these pictures. They were hanging in the living room of my uncle Wolfgang (after which I was named). Later, my aunt, then my mother, inherited them. And after they all had died, these pictures, decades later, landed in my household, this summer 2014. Along with tons of old cigar boxes (“oh, no, he never smoked”).
And while these paintings are massive, very large and totally impressive size and detail wise, they convey this sense of being unable to see the forest because of all the trees.
So, hey, heritage.
I tried them out. Here is how they looked at my place. Really, really, rustical.
So yeah how weird. But you know what? I had a tumor too. I do not need that type of “hopeless” and “depressed” in my house. Not that type of thing, with my grandfather’s dying man’s soul breathing from these canvases. Besides I did not feel like I owed him or his other relatives the effort to preserve any of this. These pictures were therapy, for him, and they were used to basically ornament and decorate my uncle’s living room.
But then I am my mum’s son, and so what is easier than to use a bit of brush, spray or ideas and get going. After all, we were brought up with the clear idea that the only by doing things oneself could one expect to obtain really useful and beautiful things.
So I figured that these few trees could well do with sky, color, and maybe a bird, just in order to take these frames and canvases to their intended meaning – a meaning that I project onto them, obviously – and that meaning is, to decorate, to ornament, to look good, and to convey a bit of joy given the oppressive forest / tree problem there.
So one picture was redone with a blue sky and an orange bird.
“Redone”: I just took the canvas out, and painted over the trees. I left a few layers of blue color out up top, so you can still see where the old man had supposed these trees to be.
Then I painted the frame dark using some ‘palisander’ tone.
The second picture was done in a more unforgiving way.
I did have enough of inheriting depressive tree trunks. So I blasted pink all over it. And the frame got painted as well. In real life the picture is cooler because of some stuff I added to the colors to make them change a bit depending on the light angle.
The cupboard was fixed as well. You can read about it here.
