COLE

My favorite fairy tale is Alice in Wonderland. I love the imagination and how it is taken for granted. Sure, the red roses have been painted with red paint. Of course, a drink can make me taller and a pastry can make me shorter (or was it the other way around?). Why question that and wallow in fear when you can just enjoy the absolute absurdity? Sometimes I take a moment and laugh at life. Because it’s just so absurd. I like to see my life a little crazier. Often people are rigid in their everyday lives and don’t see the bigger picture. Life is just life. Either you make it fun and colorful or you stay in a gray cloud, as if wrapped in cotton. 

At the same time, you also run the risk of feeling the full intensity of life if you have this attitude; I was forced to look deep inside myself in order to break out of the automatic rhythm at all. When my favorite artist CRO released the song “Märchenwald” with the artist Jolle, I put on my headphones and jumped around and danced like a madwoman to it. All of that in the morning hours before work. It tells that all fairy tales are lies. It talks about how we believed things as children that we now see differently as adults. We see the harsh reality. We see how something really is instead of believing in the fairy tales that we were told, that we told ourselves. Still we have some hope.

That can hurt. It did hurt me a lot. The transition from child to adult is not always easy. But I am very grateful for my reality, I am grateful to be alive. You do take the risk of feeling pain. Nevertheless have I found a certain beauty in reality. I am so carried away by it, that I would almost describe myself as hungry for realness. I want to experience life fully.

But I will never forget the Alice in me. Because I can choose not to.

It took a while to paint this picture. I started in April and continued sporadically. I found the proportions particularly difficult. Mixing the skin color was hell. Playing with the pink color was fun though. The idea came from the feelings described above, the song and the original sketch from my old sketchbook from about 8-9 years ago. It gave me a lot to put the old sketch on canvas and maybe take me a little bit back to that exact old time. It’s as if I looked at my old self and said “I see you and what you’re doing is good”. Through this project I have shown this old sketch and my old self a little love.

Song: Märchenwald by CRO, Jolle