Do you believe in magic?

I am lucky enough to be greeted every morning at work by a new image in my calendar of the art of Austrian born painter and spiritual ecologist Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928-2000) .  He  consistently worked with spiral motifs, primitive forms, spectral colors, and repetitive patterns. His name translated into English means “Hundred Waters”. In  the quote that follows, take note of the line,  And so I have succeeded in throwing windows open. After my illuminating experience with the skylight ‘affair’, this is so apt.

This visionary artist also designed a landmark apartment house in Vienna that has a “green” roof of dirt and grass, two trees growing from inside the house, and uneven floors…he felt the unevenness was more comfortable and natural to the foot.

Hundertwasser can be considered a “colorist” painter, as color is an essential, if not overriding element of all his work. He used highly saturated colors regardless of subject matter. Spirals first appeared in Hundertwasser work in 1953 and became the most consistent element in his work.

Paintings for me are gateways, which enable me, if I have been successful, to open them into a world which is both near and far for us, to which we have no admission, in which we find ourselves, but which we cannot perceive, which is against the real world. Our parallel world, from which we remove ourselves in one respect.

Yes, and that is the paradise, that is what we are in, what we are arrested in, and which some inexplicable power denies us. And so I have succeeded in throwing windows open.

How I succeeded is difficult to explain. On no account by force, nor by calculation, nor by intelligence, nor necessarily by intuition, but almost as though sleep-walking. I believe, and I am absolutely certain, and therefore I believe, that painting is a religious occupation, that the actual impulse comes from without, from something else that we do not know, an indefinable power which comes or does not come and which guides your hand.

People used to say in earlier times that it was the muse, for example, it’s a stupid thing to say of course, but it is some kind of illumination. And the only thing one can do is to prepare the ground, so that this extraterrestrial impulse or however else one might describe it can reach you. That means keeping oneself ready. That means eliminating the will, eliminating the intelligence, eliminating “wanting to do better”, eliminating ambition.

I should perhaps like to be known as the magician of vegetation or something similar. We are in need of magic. I fill a picture until it is full with magic, as one fills up a glass with water. Everything is so infinitely simple, so infinitely beautiful. Hundertwasser,  1975