Boiling colours, layers & a feeling of feathers
A visit to Julia Rüther
It smells like cloves and cinnamon in Julia Rüther's workshop. There is a special reason for that. Julia teaches art students from the University of the Arts how to paint and make art in an environmentally friendly way. Instead of acrylic paint, they use paste made from plants or casein paint made from curd, for example.
Later, we make our own paints from plants that have natural dyes in them. Golden yellow can be obtained from a pomegranate peel. An avocado pit carries delicate yellowish pink. And if you boil a red cabbage, you gain lilac pigments.
That's what we do! We cook red cabbage, madder and turmeric roots. We fold and crease tear-proof Japanese paper and dip it in places in the boiled colour and later in alum salt. This makes the colours glow even more intensively. Beautiful patterns are created when we unfold the Japanese paper again.
But Julia Rüther not only teaches, she also paints herself in her studio. She is fascinated by patterns that carry a rhythm and layers. "I only think paintings are good if they have a lot of layers," she says.
The only portrait she has ever painted has fifty layers. It is a painting by Antonello da Messina that actually hangs in the Louvre in Paris. Julia repainted it in her early twenties because she wanted to know if she could do something like that. She worked on this painting for eight hours a day for three months. Fifty layers painted on top of each other! So long that she herself looked like the man in the picture she portrayed, Julia says with a laugh.
Normally she doesn't paint portraits, but things "that we can't describe". A woman once asked her in a group exhibition which picture she had painted. Julia made a flowing movement with her hands. "Oh, the painting with the feeling of feathers!" the woman said. That was the nicest compliment for Julia.
