"Fremd bin ich eingezogen; Fremd zieh ich wieder aus."

"A stranger I arrived; a stranger I depart."

Wilhelm Müller: Gute Nacht

Franz Schubert: Winterreise D911, #1 Gute Nacht

I was inspired by the lieder cycle from Franz Schubert, who wrote these songs in February 1827 and October 1827, based on a collection of poems from Wilhelm Müller Poems from the posthumous papers of a traveling horn-player. 

The cycle has two parts of twelve poems each. It tells of the heartbreak of a man who steals away from town in the middle of winter. The mood of the cycle perfectly exemplifies the Romantic Imaginary: The Night, Solitude, Nature, the Journey, the Road. All of these elements refer to the aesthetics of the Romantic Landscape depicted by Caspar David Friedrich, J.W.M. Turner or the Hudson River School. They looked at Nature in a totally new way. it was the impression of Nature on the artist which was represented. Is Nature embracing the viewer or is Nature threatening him instead? 

Nature is the interlocutor of the Wanderer. We are the Wanderer, landscape only exists in the eyes of the traveler. It's the superior power of the Sublime, which will take us to the acceptance of ourselves, and our limitations. Desolation, inner grief and solitude must be accepted to attain the reunion with your inner self. You must travel outside to travel inside and find oneself at the end of the journey. Paraphrasing Goethe: "Über allen Gipfeln, ist Ruh."

The romantic persona of the Wanderer is brought to our time in the form of a quintessential American tradition, the Road Trip. The vastness of the American landscape, the Big Skies of the West, the empty spaces can present as both spectacularly beautiful on the one hand, and also severe and punishing, on the other. I work to present these scenes the way I feel them: as beholden to the great expanse of skyline. Pointing to the marks left by civilization on the landscape in the form of dwellings, both homes and barns, the electricity and telephone lines that draw themselves across the landscape, and empty, endless country roads. Sometimes it’s not clear where these roads are even going. They seem to exist on their own without an obvious destination.

This journey without a clear destination is arriving maybe to what it could be understood as a beginning. Without a clear narrative and through different moods, the traveler is experimenting throughout until there is acceptance of the reality of life. This is what I try to convey through my vision of these bleak spaces.

In his magnificent study of Schubert's Winterreise, the tenor Ian Bostridge, one of the all-time best interpreters of the cycle, expresses this concept in a very clear way: "Like all the great artists, he (Schubert) makes the most of the accidental, with a serendipitous intensification of the Byronic method of displacement, a turn of the screw. Winterreise is at one and the same time homely and insistently mysterious, one of the secrets of its enormous power." Quoted by Bostridge is also David Shields's book Reality Hunger: "The absence of plot gives the reader room to think about other things". (Winter Journey: Anatomy of an obsession. Faber&Faber 2015)