Nov 273 min read

Limitation as a creativity booster & the Artists' Christmas Market

A recipe for creativity?

What seems counterintuitive at first is actually the secret recipe for creative solutions: Limitation. If we have limited resources to achieve a goal, we must think of much more unusual solutions and come up with other ideas.

We know this from everyday life: just imagine you are still unsure what you want to cook for dinner – is it easier to think about it in a huge supermarket or in your own kitchen with everything you have on hand? When it comes to leftovers, you can rarely stick exactly to a recipe – you improvise, try things out, find new combinations and ways of doing things.

It's no different in art – too many materials and possibilities can leave us feeling paralysed and not knowing where to start. If, on the other hand, we limit ourselves to selected tools, colours or themes, it suddenly starts to flow.

An exercise in black and white thinking

A common exercise in painting is the use of a limited palette. This means that you decide which colours you want to work with before you start painting and mix all the other colours from this selection. This has several advantages – the pictures often look more harmonious and you have to make fewer decisions during the process. The best-known limited palette is probably the Zorn palette, which is designed to create harmonious portraits.

I have also come across the idea of defining a shade of red, a shade of blue, a shade of yellow and black and white as a limited palette. Depending on personal preference, this can also be exciting – I would probably choose neon pink as red, for example, and the palette would immediately have its own character.

The pictures I would like to present today were created from the limitation of painting completely in black and white. The aim was to develop exciting compositions and to develop an eye for contrasts in brightness. (I've already written a lot about this topic here.) It's about guiding the eye, as our eye jumps to the strongest contrasts first and only perceives nuances later.

A different approach to finding a theme

I often take a very conceptual approach to a painting series, starting the process with research and then interpreting what I have learnt on the canvas. This series was different.

The motif ‘Rook’ was initially created by chance, an abstract result of play and experimentation. It was only when I thought I recognised the chess figure in the abstract form that I made the plan to continue working with it and create a complete series from it.

But it wasn't so easy to maintain the looseness and free approach once I had a clearer goal in mind. Some motifs are more closely orientated to the actual shapes of the figures than others. Overall, it was a really challenging process to develop a coherent and simultaneously varied series of images without simply repeating something. As is so often the case in chess, the opening was easy and the endgame lengthy.

Why chess? Like so many others, I had an intensive chess phase during the pandemic, played a lot online, had an initially steep and then increasingly flatter learning curve. I still think the series ‘Queens Gambit’ is great and the Rocket Beans TV show ‘Zugzwang’ also brightened up my time at home.

Christmas Market

Do you happen to be in the Frankfurt / Main area any time soon? I'm currently exhibiting the chess series for the first time – at the 102nd Artists' Christmas Market. You can find my works at the exhibition in St Paul's Church at stand 42 (Ha! How cool is that!) together with some paintings of my Privacy series.

If you want to meet me in person, come by on 16 or 18 December or let me know in advance. I look forward to seeing you.

Info about the Artists' Christmas Market: