„’Tis the times‘ plague, when madmen lead the blind.“ King Lear
Making pictures is play.
Play is anarchy.
Anarchy is freedom.
Everything else is politics.
„Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.“
Friedrich von Schiller
Art is a sophisticated game that you play really well.
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Hello! My name is August Felix Heid. I am a creator of images.
(„ein Bildermacher“ in my mother tongue)
I’m drawn to everything that feeds my five senses.
They are the connection to the world. They are the world.
Unlike most artists these days I am not at all interested in involving politics into art.
On the contrary. I seek freedom, independence, almost the absence of any politics.
Freedom does not mean randomness, coincidence or excessiveness.
What I mean by freedom is the enhancement of the aesthetic sensitivity.
In order to find new forms, rhythms, and compositions I let the different mediums influence each other. For example, I may take a photo from a painting and use it as part of a composition on the computer. This line of work, in turn, has influence on the painting process. I compare it to improvisation in jazz. You have to know your material really well. And then you have to let go.
A picture evolves in the head of a viewer. Every viewer will see something else, depending on his or her culture, origin and experience.
I want to feed the visual senses of a viewer. Life and therefore the world is complicated and irritating at times. So are my pictures. But there is also rhythm and rhyme in all the mess. I hope the viewer will find inspiration, attentiveness, stimulation, and beauty.
Masks
This series is entirely photographed from the screen and digitally composed. I create figures by assembling „new“ entities from a variety of photographs. This game can get very rough and is often an act of appropriation. I snatch my prey from the fleeting net, get the best pieces and appropriate them. What was foreign a short time before is now mine, because I have taken it apart and put it back together again. I make it permanent.
How does my brain identify a face, a person? How does a computer identify a face? Where are the limits of recognition? How does an overall impression emerge although many different individual parts are to be seen? How do culture and experience shape the pattern of recognition? Does one recognize the „constructed persons“ as a unit again, does it begin to „live“?
It is these stimuli that keep me going.
„There is no line between sweetness and sentimentality; but one must not cross it.“
Artur Rubinstein
The abstract way
In this series I focus on abstract pictures because they offer me even more freedom than figurative art. I can do whatever I want but what do I want?
When everything is possible, much remains uncertain. I have to figure out for myself which signs, forms and rhythms I react to and bring them into a form without the leitmotif of an object.
Art is meaningful, valuable, and exciting precisely because of its irrelevance to our most immediate, surface-level concerns.
„The wilful child
Once upon a time there was a child who was willful, and would not dowh at her mother wished. For this reason God had no pleasure in her, and let her become ill, and no doctor could do her any good, and in a short time she lay on her death-bed. When she had been lowered into her grave, and the earth was spread over her, all at once her arm came out again, and stretched upwards, and when they had put it in and spread fresh earth over it, it was all to no purpose, for the arm always came out again. Then the mother herself was obliged to go to the grave, and strike the arm with a rod, and when she had done that, it was drawn in, and then at last the child had rest beneath the ground.“
Brothers Grimm
About the fairy-tales:
The original texts were much more expressive than the „soft-flushed“ ones that are printed today. Have you ever read the Brothers Grimm in the original?
Von einem eigensinnigen Kinde
Es war einmal ein Kind eigensinnig und that nicht was seine Mutter haben wollte. Da hatte der liebe Gott kein Wohlgefallen an ihm und es ward krank, und kein Arzt konnt‘ ihm helfen und bald lag es auf dem Todtenbettchen. Als es ins Grab versenkt war, und Erde darüber gedeckt, kam auf einmal sein Aermchen wieder hervor und reichte in die Höhe, und wenn sie es hineinlegten und frische Erde darüber legten, so half das nicht, er kam immer wieder heraus. Da mußte die Mutter selber zum Grab gehen und mit der Ruthe auf das Aermchen schlagen, und wie sie das gethan hatte, zog es sich hinein und hatte nun erst Ruh unter der Erde.
Gebrüder Grimm
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,”
William Faulkner
“Love is a relationship between dying things,”
Roger Scruton
„Treat a work of art like a prince – let it speak to you first“
Arthur Schopenhauer
„Don’t just do something,“ Calvin Coolidge said. ‘Stand there“.
„I’d rather not“,
Bartleby
Making pictures is play.
Play is anarchy.
Anarchy is freedom.
Everything else is politics.