Influences: Friedensreich Hundertwasser

The last few days of architecture school back in '96 were just a formality.  Our senior projects were finished.  Final exams were just paperwork to get through.  The stress was over.  In a few days, a ceremony would mark the end of our university days.  On one of those last days in the lab, we circled are chairs and went around the room - each of us telling the class what our plans were for the real world waiting for us just around the bend.  So-and-so had an interview with a firm in San Francisco.  Another was going to try her luck in an office down in Santa Monica.  One by one, it seemed to me that each student had a socially acceptable blueprint mapped out for the next phase of their life.  When it came to be my turn, I said something about traveling in Europe for a while and maybe starting a band.

When I got to Europe, I decided to stay.  I took work at Casa Cares, a retreat and group meeting center in the hills above Florence, Italy.  The center attracted an eclectic patronage from around the world, opening my eyes to the infinite number of ways one could construct a meaningful life.  Somewhere early on in my new adventure I was introduced to the work of Friedensreich Hundertwasser .  He was a painter, but also an architect (sort of), a philosopher, writer, and traveler.  His socks never matched.  He grew veggies on his roof.  His approach to constructing his life made sense to me and I dove into learning all I could about him.

Hundertwasser came from Vienna but later regarded New Zealand his home (he was buried there in 2000 when he died at the age of 71).  He lived on a boat - sometimes in Venice, Italy, other times in New Zealand, once in Japan.  He had strong opinions about how the world should be when it came to art and architecture.  He wrote manifestos on green living and environmental urban design.  He showed up nude to lectures in demonstration of the "first skin" that we are born with.  (The second would be our clothes.  The third would be architecture.)  He thought that tenants in downtown high rises should have the right to embellish their homes as far as their arms could reach out of the window.  He thought that a plane flying over a city should be able to look down and see only green grass growing on roof tops.  Hundertwasser detested the straight line in the modern city, even going so far as to relate it's existence to an increase in cancer diagnoses.  He stretched his architectural imagination into the Viennese urban landscape, most notably in the house/museum that bears his name.  No straight lines there.  I was lucky enough to have been able to visit the Hundertwasser House in 2005. 

Though I do admire Hundertwasser's paintings, it would be difficult to find signs of his influence in my painting.  More influential to me was his approach to being alive through his art.  As Joseph Campbell once put it, rather than seeking the meaning of life, most people are simply trying to feel "the rapture of being alive".  Hundertwasser, by merging his art and his imagination into the fabric of his life and into that of those around him, seemed to strike a balance between the two paths in a way that made sense to me in the early days of my artistic journey and in a way that I hoped I'd one day similarly be able to achieve.