Ship of Folly

I have always considered my paintings to be some kind of story telling or delivering of messages in a dense form, just as lyrics do, though using depictions instead of metaphors. I picked my motives at random, always inspired by everyday's life and events.

However, about 25 years ago, having read Sebastian Brant's "Ship of Folly", printed 1496 in nearby Basel, I realized that the foolhardiness of our species had not changed during the last 500 years or even three millennia. I was, therefore, inspired to demonstrate this via a series of paintings and matching rhymes, some kind of a new and contemporary edition of the old "bateau ivre".

The potential motives have almost expired, because our species has not really come up with truly new follies. Consequently, I looked for new tasks and started, about 13 years ago, a new series of paintings "micro-patterns of nature". The message this time is a single one: do not always look on-way into space only, with the help of more and more powerful telescopes, which are supposed to help us with understanding our world and universe, but also probe into the other direction with the help of more and more powerful microscopes, such discovering the beauty of the micro-verse with all its shapes and patterns.

This series depicts stylized micro-crystals, liquid crystals and chemical molecules of all kind in a 10'000 times magnification. Not only the contemplation about the very big, but also about the very small can help us to realize without presumption where we fit in. For Demokrit and Archimedes this still was everyday occurrence, because they were not distracted by modern essentials like Facebook and Twitter.

Klaus Eichler, 2022