The Backstory of a Painting
By: Kurt von Behrmann
A video that shows the creative process
My GoFund me page to support the exhibition where this work will be shown.
My Web site
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| Pferd- An interpretation of what it feels like to be bipolar, 2015 Acrylic on Canvas Painting |
Pferd (Horse) acrylic canvas
Several years
ago a jockey asked me if I would create a painting with him wearing his silks.
The idea appealed to me. Having been
raised in Kentucky may have played in a part in why I liked the concept. For reasons that I will never know the
answers, he vanished. What remained with me was the idea of creating an
equestrian painting.
With no
previous history of ever having painted horses, I started the process with a
series of sketches. Originally the horse was going to be highly stylized. As
the work developed, the horse evolved into the configuration of a recognizable
horse in motion, not a distortion of one.
Italian
Futurism was a movement that for some inexplicable reason became a muse for
this painting. Umberto
Boccioni, The City Rises (1910) was one work that I
recalled from art history that I felt would be starting point, along with
German Expressionism. Another previous art movement that would also play a
part, symbolism.
Symbolists believed
that art should reflect an emotion or an idea rather than represent the natural
world only. This was what I was doing with “Pferd,” to a great degree. The
image is recognizable, but the emotions and ideas expressed are primary.
Although symbolism began
as a literary movement, it was a natural for artists. There is substantial
common ground between artists and writers. One uses words to craft a message,
the other paint.
I also liked the idea of
objects representing multiple meanings to express a deeper truth. The horse in
the painting is representational of the human mind. Being that the horse is a
symbol strongly associated with Kentucky, and Stuttgart, my home town, the
references to my past are clearly stated.
Because
so many artists have used horses as symbols for very human conditions, it seemed a logical idea. With the
horse representing the mind, a constantly moving thing, the poles in the
painting were representative of the two states of bipolar disorder, mania and
depression.
The active brush strokes,
the Italian Futurists love of depicting movement and bright expressive color
made this what I consider a visual description of bipolar. This brain disease, to me, lends itself well
to being expressed visually.
Bipolar is constant
motion. One is thrown between action and inactivity. Mania is a high voltage
adrenaline act that you hope lasts forever. Depression is that unavoidable
descent that immediately causes the ascent into frenzied madness. The cycle does
not stop. Your constantly moving between overwhelming exuberance or crippling
depression. This has been my experience with bipolar.
The bipolar mind is akin
to a thoroughbred. It is one that adores running. It loathes the point when exhaustion kicks in
and one can no longer make a “run for the roses.” This was the first painting I
completed while on medications. The drugs did change things. It certainly
slowed me down. It also made me think much harder and dig so much deeper. I was
depicting an interior world using external shapes and forms. Sometimes recognizable, sometimes a
collection of brush strokes, Pferd was in some ways the culmination of a
process started before I became serious ill.
