When I started this website, I warned you, dear reader, that I would post on this news page only when I saw fit, and that therefore, there would be no regular updates in any discernible rhythm.
This fact I have now thoroughly demonstrated. The last post on here was made when the pandemic was raging, many things got just bleak and dark, and I stopped posting. That was five years ago. There is war in the west now, condoned genocide in the Levant, dark wars in Africa, and the powerlandscapes that we got used to in the west during the past eight decades are breaking, crumbling or downright imploding. On top of that, in the whole world climate disasters are speeding up, happening more and more often, signalling what is to come. Meanwhile, I paint. And draw a lot of Monkey Kings, as these are Monkey King times.
As most of you know, I am no longer in Ottawa. My lady got transferred to Vienna.
We moved from the new world to the old world, from endless forests, single storey suburbs, six lane city streets and flat bed trucks to century old gilded bourgeois buildings adorned with ever so many tortured looking Atlas figures at their grand entrances bordering cobblestone streets. Public transport on every corner arriving at a five to seven minute interval. Fancy restaurants and hip bars everywhere, as well as sleepy coffee parlours still stuck in the seventies or eighties. Hidden wonderful courtyards -with terraces! Crypts, shrines, churches, from early medieval to brutalist modern. A towering cathedral. (The belltowers ring out on both Saturdays and Sundays) Ballrooms. Music halls. Opera.
The breath of the nineteenth century is still felt in the streets here. And that old spirit comes truly alive during ball season.
Vienna in Christmas time. “I love the smell of gluhwein in the morning!”
Culture is still written in capitals in this city. Generous subsidies, museum and gallery attendance that is off the charts, if you compare the numbers to the rest of Western Europe…..
This is an image of a world that my grandparents rebelled against….
Not to mention an extensive art world with many federal state funded museums, provincially funded museums and city funded artvenues, renowned as well as alternative galleries, vibrant art film houses (seven in total!) even a poetry school and a few artists’ communities in repurposed buildings, that are under threat from development as they always are everywhere.
I found a studio in the Creative Cluster, located in an old schoolbuilding in the fifth neighbourhood where visual artists, filmmakers, theatre makers, designers, illustrators and other creative small businesses have found a home.
How long the Creative Cluster will still exist is not entirely sure, but so far, it looks like the artists can remain there till September 2026. After that, all bets are off.
Because no matter how much culture focused this city still is, the world of money will not rest until it has eaten everything, everything, everything. It will eat itself, too, in the end.
My studio in the process of becoming.
Vienna on a cold December morning
… and under the near neverending grey skies that no doubt have something to do with the proverbial Viennese bad mood…
Which makes the spontaneous parties around the fountain by the Karl’s church during warm summer nights all the more exhuberant.
