Uta Schotten

⎯⎯⎯ I PAINT IT

The eternal origin of art is that a form confronts a human being and seeks to become a work through the individual. The form that confronts me, I cannot experience or describe; I can only give it form. Yet it is clearer than all the clarity of the experienced world. Not as a thing among other things. Not as a figment of the imagination, but as that which is present. Objectively speaking, the form does not exist at all. It cannot take shape until I give it one.

It acts upon me as I act upon it. To create is to draw from the source. To invent is to find. Formation is discovery. In the act of realizing, I uncover. I lead the form over into the world. The work is a thing among things, describable as a sum of qualities. To the attentive viewer, my work can appear again and again as a physical presence and—as an eternally appearing form, in presence—continually unfold anew. The receptive beholder can experience the painting as a living event happening in the "now."

While my earlier works were born of suffering, I now create from a clarified spirit. In the first phase of my life, I looked upon this world with a clouded consciousness. Whereas the troubled mind sees the world with terror, the clarified spirit sees the world in peace and divine order.

It is a discovery without searching; a discovery of that which is the primordial and the origin. Where all means have crumbled, this present encounter occurs, for which I strive. I do not represent a devised, conceptual position.

I do not analyze. I paint it.  

Uta Schotten, in August 2024

Life requires no experimental setup, no logic. Life seeks to prove nothing. Everything is possible in the here and now, in the absence of space and time. Art is life guided by intuition. Intuition is the only possibility of human perception that reaches beyond the logic of the intellect to see things with different eyes.  

I make my insights, my view of the world, visible on the canvas. Craft, technique, and effects do not interest me. I turn my back on the world to follow my intuition, the process of cognition.  

The confrontation with myself is an essential part of my work. Painting is merciless, direct, and pure; it reflects existence. Here, there is no hiding behind a technical vehicle.  

Painting is the silence of the intellect. Painting cannot be devised. Human life serves development. I have declared painting to be my playground for this purpose. The head demands logic and words. Intuitive knowledge is feeling. Feeling leads me to truthfulness. Seeing leads me to reality. Intuition is wiser and more intelligent than you or I. What I feel and see does not need to be analyzed, interpreted, discussed, or understood with the head.  

I paint it.  

Uta Schotten, in November 2016