“When I paint, I zone out completely”

By Umer NangianaBeginning with an innate obsession for colour, form and composition, she has gone on to take questions as old and complex as “where do we come from and where do we go?” Not that these questions have never been contemplated in the world of art before, yet her take on it comes out as an avant-garde impression in its own right.Read from top to bottom or right to left, the canvas accentuating “where do we come from” pulls you inwards to an invisible source of light from where you see life sprouting outwards.The departure is vivid, as are the colours; yet life emerges in conjunction with light that exerts a strange gravitational pull, keeping the two of them ever attached.The creator of this painting, Annette Wendling-Willeke, a German expatriate, is an interior architect by profession. She now sees herself more as an artist than architect. For the past five years, art has been more than just a hobby for her.Spotted building grand structures from wooden building blocks at the age of five, Annette chose her career path chasing a passion for “colours, form and composition.”  The search for ultimate contentment however, continued until she found it some 20 years ago in Sri Lanka.“I moved with my husband to Sri Lanka in 1994 and ended up working with him for his company on a construction site. I didn’t enjoy what I was doing so I was looking for something else, and found an art class,” Annette tells Community by way of explaining how art found her and how she finally, embraced it.  Since then, her relationship with art has grown very strong. Despite carrying on with her architect’s job for another 16 years — currently, she is managing Outreach and Community class at Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar (VCU-Q) — Annette has been able to create masterpieces of art and title them as “Essence of life”, “Between Cultures” and “Strange Wonders.”  “I have been drawing ever since I was a child. Interior architecture is a kind of mediator between art and technical side. So what started as something next to my work basically became what I am doing mostly, apart from my job,” alludes the artist.  Although she has been painting more than doing anything else since 2010, Annette admits, it is sometimes, difficult to make a switch from her demanding job towards art. But it is that craving for the process of creativity itself that drives her.“When I paint, I zone out completely so it is a very meditating process. (But) it can be a very painful process at times….when it takes time for you to get to that point when something comes out of you,” says Annette. “It is difficult also to switch from my job. To go from that frame of mind to a frame of mind where I paint, sometimes is a difficult switch,” she admits.  The artist works mostly with acrylic paints, pure pigment, coloured pencil, and sometimes crayon. Layer upon layer, she covers, adds, and takes away, by means of painting, scraping, scratching, stenciling, spraying, and glazing.She had started with copying drawings and paintings from other people and great masters.  Her first real ideas culminated in the form of a series of paintings called “Sunny day in Jaffna” in Sri Lanka, where she spent 14 years.For the most of that period, there was a civil war. It was during the two and a half years of ceasefire that she got a chance to visit Jaffna.  Driving around with a friend, she took a lot of photographs. These photographs showed a lot of destruction but she spotted beauty in them, at the same time.“At the time, I thought this was the past. I did a whole series of paintings that showed my take on what I thought was a remnant of a war. It turned out it was not,” recalls Annette.It was her first real project and she remembers it as a stark contrast between a terrible reality and actual beauty. “A wall with bullet holes and the sun shines on it, the shades; I mean it is colourful, picturesque and it has a static quality to it that conceals what the reality behind it, is,” she says poignantly.  Her painting style changed completely however, when she came to Qatar. In Sri Lanka, it was fairly muted because it’s tropical and it is surrounded by so much colour, form and in abundance; you don’t necessarily need it that much. So you tend to tone it down more than anything else, says Annette.“While here (in Qatar), nature gives you very little in terms of colour and form. I mean it does give nuances of specific hues and shapes, but it is much less than what you see in tropics. So it is more of a memory of colour and form or a need for colour and form that comes on to my canvas because I miss it so much,” she adds.Besides painting, she has also done some conceptual work particularly her project, the Strange Wonders, where she did a collection of stones which showed glimpses of Doha.Her ongoing series of paintings, Between Cultures, is an extension of what she started two years ago. For this, she took inspiration from her stays in four different culturally diverse countries such as Sri Lanka, Australia, Germany and now, Qatar.“But all of them have one thing in common. They all use masks in some way that may be a very ritualistic way or may be just a make-up,” suggests the artist.In Germany, they have a long tradition of carnivals; in Sri Lanka, they have a lot of colourful masks and similarly in Australia, they use various kinds of ritualistic masks in whatever gatherings of aboriginal Australians.“In some way, this seems to be something that we need as human beings, sometimes just to play and sometimes to fulfil the role that we take in human society. So that was the thinking behind it (Between Cultures),” says Annette.  She continues working on these as they are part of a series. These are fanciful stories of funny creatures that could mean anything. Another new project partly related to this one is also shaping up.  In it, she has used Photoshop and manipulated photographs to create collages. The art scene in Doha, she says, has grown so incredibly fast over the last couple of years. There is so much happening all the time.“The liveliest artistic community is certainly here. The Sri Lankan artistic community is also very lively and interwoven as well. There are literature and jazz festivals where artists mix and mingle but here it is different,” says Annette.Besides the works of Georgia O’Keeffe, the legendary American artist, and that of Anselm Kiefer, Annette says she has, works of local artists such as Yousef Ahmed find favour with her.“He is fantastic and also the people who have come here and people who are already here. I also like the work of people who are doing the computer controlled stuff, it is very interesting,” says Annette.While her earlier paintings were referential to the emotions experienced in a beloved but war-torn island, her later pieces considered the constant change of a life navigating between cultures, she says.Her more recent works contemplate belonging, absence and change. “Life’s path unfolds in a cyclical pattern: from a beginning to an end, to a new beginning, where do we come from and where do we go?,” opines Annette.