Painting

The silk and me

 


 

In the 1990s I worked intensively on the possibility of developing a technique that would enable me to paint on the medium of silk, to direct the flow of colour in such a way that the shades would run the way I wanted them to, to develop luminosity and to allow the medium to exist as such without “gumming it up”.

Silk is a wonderful material, noble, stubborn, challenging, enduring for centuries. After many years I was finally satisfied with the results and from 1999 onwards I went public with my work. It was not always easy to make it in the art world, because “silk painting” as such has a rather bad reputation as “the hobby bored housewives do at home”. But with my work I have managed to give silk the status in art that it deserves. From 2008 onwards, my work was also shown internationally, in Austria, Switzerland and France.

Ausschnitt des Gemäldes: Marguerite Duras. Detailausschnitt Kopf
Marguerite Duras – Detail

 

The secret of the luminosity of my works is the fact that I painted the pictures 3 times on top of each other. So all the shades of colour that were created in the first step were overlaid twice more – and then there it came, the colour intensity. And I was happy.

Das Gemälde zeigt einen nackten Jüngling, der sich am Ufer eines Flusses zusammenkauert.
Project #appropriationart – Even in Italy rivers are cold

 

The contours that emphasise the outer forms are a requirement for the colours to remain controllable. And since I found my love for art starting with expressionism, this has always been an additional enhancement for me and a homage to this art movement in my visual language. But also for this I have never worked with prefabricated gutta, but mixed my colours for myself and then thickened them.

Ausschnitt aus dem Gemälde Mohamed. Zu sehen ist ein kleiner dunkelhäutiger Junge in Tracht seiner Kultur.
Project Mon Paris

 

I needed about 2-4 weeks for one painting. Because silk doesn’t forgive mistakes – you can’t overpaint or cover up anything. Therefore, after about 6 hours, the working day was finished, because the concentration was no longer there. As the years went by, however, I wanted a further development, felt like trying new things. And since my hands no longer function so well that I could hold a brush for a long time, after the #12MalAnders project I decided to always remember painting on silk as a wonderful epoch in my artistic life and got involved in swapping brushes and paints for a camera, mouse and graphics programme. And even now I’m happy when a work turns out the way I imagined it.

Detail from the painting La Mode. It shows a beautiful model, with yellow eyes, wearing a green jacket and an open-hearted blouse underneath.
Project #12timesdifferent

 

In following projects you can find paintings by Eva Leopoldi:

Project #12malanders

Project #MonParis

#AnArtistSeesLiteratur

Project #Appropriation Art

 

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