Dagmar Dost-Nolden – Painting
Although in the course of the 20th century the end of painting as an art form was often proclaimed, some artists, even in times of the most radical and revolutionary changes, remained uninfluenced on their own course and continued to paint their works as they saw fit. Today, at the beginning of the 21th century, the many and manifold exhibitions in museums, galleries and art fairs are proving over again that the painted picture has not lost its validity.
Dagmar Dost-Nolden is a painter of inner persuasion and necessity and brings that which she sees, feels and moves into visible forms on the canvas. Her artistic career, which already began in 1960, experienced a change in the 1990`s from an initially figurative and widely accessible art into an expressive, almost even spiritual abstraction.
The works of the last five years, which this catalogue shows through selected examples, make evident on what level of tension the artist is working and what antagonizing forces come into play: the deliberate and the unconscious, the rational and the irrational, spontaneity and the calculated plan, substantial and spiritual reality, nature and human artefacts. Although various abstract concepts play an important role in this process: energy, dynamics, impulse, motion, atmosphere, light and air, the most important ideas for this artist are those of the “human being” and “nature” in all their different facets and ambivalence.
Energies discharge into thick convergences and whirlpools of colors, here and there even into powerful explosions coming from a central point, which however must not necessarily be the formal centres of the composition. In this way openings and vistas are attained into the depth of the canvas, into something which appears to lie beyond the visible surface.
Explosions are uncontrolled motions that the artist manifests by vigorous strokes of the brush. A luminous red, a brilliant yellow, an intensive blue are whirling about the canvas and project beams of light in all directions. The power and the energy that the artist invests into these compositions practically spring over toward the spectator. Often black lines flicker over the surface of the pictures like flashes of lightning (as in “energy1”), they accent the branches and leaves waving in a tree (as in “Symphony of a Tree” and “Secrets of the Underbrush”), or they emphasize the outer and inner movement of a human being (as in the series under the title: ”Call” ).
Dagmar Dost-Nolden works above all with the idea of the “human being”, it is the central point of her interest, because man involves everything in his being that she would like make visible: he moves, he causes changes in himself, he releases energy, and behaves through his emotions and temper. Often that which she wants to show is not immediately evident, because hermotifs are difficult to discover. She demands from her serious viewers that they take a second look at her work and use their powers of imagination for their own creative interpretations. The human figure and its surroundings often conglomerate and achieve unity among diversity. A valid example is the energized “Diptychon”, which, from an apparent tangle of lines and colors, extracts on prolonged viewing the figures of a man and a woman standing antithetically. Each figure emits radiating lines over to the other figure. “The external form is not so important, the same contents could be expressed in an abstract painting. “ opined the artist. This “Diptychon” proves her theory and shows simultaneously how intensively she herself enters into a dialogue with her figures.
Every picture in the artist’s oeuvre arises out of an inspiration during the painting process, through the thoughts, the feelings, and the mood of the moment in which she finds herself. These various criteria direct the development of a motif. She defines for herself much of what she is going to do before setting out, but most of what comes out – often to artist’s own amazement – manifests itself in unexpected forms and colors on the canvas.
Colours are the basis of her painting, they confer the basic emotion in which in which the artist moves. Her colours are, by the way, seldom gloomy, dull or sad. Her palette is the opposite: bright, luminous and positive.
Dagmar Dost-Nolden attributes this to her place of origin, to her way of looking at things that she learned in her native city of Prague. Prague is a city of baroque architecture, gaudy, rich in nuances and flooded with light in every season of the year. The perception of this phenomenon has made its imprint on her consciousness and guides the expressive elements of her work.
Not only the colours, but also the structures of the painting surface are influenced by her earlier experiences in Prague. The pompous baroque style and the decorative art nouveau seen everywhere in the architecture tend toward the dramatic gesture, even in places where the plaster is falling down from the walls and the facades are left to decay. Crumbling walls give clear witness to the strata of their construction and refract the sunlight intensively.
The artist has taken up this phenomenon and transmitted it into the canvas by mixing sand into the acryl or oil paint. In this way she achieves a very tactile surface, into which she engraves certain structures, depending on the thickness of the applied material. By means of
this technique she recreates on the canvas that powerful refraction of light that she was earlier able to observe on the crumbling walls. In some pictures she has added bits of cloth material of various size and thickness into the mixture of colour and sand in order to heighten and intensify these expressive possibilities.
The transparency of light is achieved by a special technique in which she prepares the canvas with a chalk solution before applying paint. The dampness of the preparation absorbs the paint and disperses the pigments irregularly over the surface. This makes them appear suddenly as light and transparent as aquarelle colours. Dagmar Dost-Nolden derives also this technique from her experience with the architecture of her native city.
When the colours, forms and lines have been brought into a synthesis, the composition of a picture gains balance, harmony and depth, the surface begins to vibrate.
The famous English painter David Hockney once declared: “Painters know about the surface, only if you acknowledge surface, can you go through it.”
Dagmar Dost-Nolden has certainly achieved that in her art.
English translation Robert Thistle
