To do what they couldn’t.

My grandmother loved to draw. I have two of her almost faded drawings hanging on my wall. Well, one is hanging, the other one is leaning on a side-table. But the particulars are not important. Important is that she loved drawing but she couldn’t. It was East-Berlin, the wall was tearing the country apart and no one had the time to frolic around with a bunch of crayons. So she exchanged the pencils for some scissors and became a proper haircutter for the community, because painting is a “breadless art” she would say, and so the dream withered along with her hair.

But for some reason this fascination for visually pleasing paper wasn’t cut off there and she passed it to my mother. As a kid I was mesmerized by her old drawings of Disney figures that she showed me with quite a bit of sorrow in her eyes. Because it was still East-Berlin back then and the wall was still cutting through homes and aspirations. And so, just like my grandmother, my mother would say: “That’s a breadless art.” and she would take a wrench and start working in a car repair shop instead. Because that’s what brings the food on the table. Drawing is cute, but cute just doesn’t cut it in post-war Berlin.

And then I arrived and I guess it’s not that much of a surprise that I loved drawing as well. It just seemed to be in our genes somehow. But it was still east Berlin and that hideous wall was still standing. Admittedly, it fell when I was just a year old, but the separation was still palpable and something to eat was still more important than a fun profession. So I grew up with the unquestionable certainty that painting is a “breadless art”. My grandmother said it, my mother said it, and so it had to be true.

I drew a lot and constantly. At home on cheap printing paper, in school in my work books and at some point on the walls. My mother would let me paint on every single wall in our small apartments and I’m still baffled that she permitted that. It looked absolutely terrible and we moved so much, more than ten times actually, and painting it over each time was a Sisyphean task. I remember this huge horse I painted on one wall behind the door of my bedroom when I was 13. It had a big black eye and no matter with how many layers of white paint we coated it, this eye would still peek through in the end.

But back to the point. I drew and I loved it. The surviving 3 inch binder full of old manga sketches in my best friend's cellar can attest to that. But I knew that this was just fun and that I had to do something else that was not fun to get that food and that roof. So when I finished school I didn’t go to university because who needs a masters degree for shoveling horse droppings. And with that I mean that I was on my way to become a zookeeper. That somehow felt like a good compromise between fun and not fun, because I actually do like horses.

But somehow fate struck me hard and the universe seemed to realize that two sad generations in a row were enough. So I didn’t get a position as a zookeeper in the whole of Germany, which I saw as a total defeat back then when in fact it couldn’t have been more of a win. Because what followed was an extremely weird chain of events that a more esoteric person would call fate and I still can’t believe it but I ended up becoming a fine artist, the one thing my parents and my parents parents wouldn’t want me to become, for my own sake.

And I was scared and I’m still scared, because I can’t forget those words: “That’s a breadless art.” and what screams starvation more than “breadless”? And to this point these smart women in my family were right and I’m thinking I shouldn’t have turned a deaf ear to their warnings. Because I haven’t earned all that much from what I love yet, three sold paintings in four years is everything else than much, I think everyone would agree, and it always surprises people when I say that. All these thumbs-up’s and hearts for my work, years of work by now, but if it wasn’t for my husband I actually might not have a roof. Well, at least not such a nice one.

People are actually coming to me for advice, people seriously want to know what my paintings are speaking about or, even better, they tell me that my paintings actually spoke to them. But what all these people don’t know is that my grandmother and my mother were unfortunately right and I just seem to be too stubborn, or reckless, to give up on this madness.

I tried doing something “serious”, I really did. I was a barkeeper, a tailor for kids costumes, a museum attendant, a game master in one of these escape room dungeons, a call center agent, a translator. You name it, I probably did it. But fate just wouldn’t let me and now I’m torn between this unquenchable desire to do what I love for the rest of my life and the wish to be able to pay for a new pair of shoes with my own money instead of my husband’s. I felt like quitting a dozen times but I can’t shake the idea that next to wanting I also just have to do this. Not just for me, but for my grandmother and my mother as well. They shouldn’t die without knowing that someone in the family finally broke the cycle. I like to think they could rest easier then and I luckily still have time to make it come true.

I’m a late bloomer and I know that. My life has been full of things that have nothing to do with painting because I never could truly accept what fate kept on slapping me in the face with and part of me always wanted to fill the shoes of my working class ancestors with their stale but secure jobs. But I came back to painting over and over again and even though it’s still not paying out in a monetary way it’s at least paying out in an emotional kind of way. That sounds cheesy, but I don’t know how else to put it. And I think that the few people who know my work and especially the ones who know me as a person on top of that see this emotional value already. I think they would be confused if I suddenly did something else and hell, I would be confused as well after I finally arrived at a conclusion at the end of this job roller-coaster. I can’t imagine doing anything else with my life now than thinking about art and preparing materials for art and putting art on a surface and giving other people that art. I still have so many ideas so I just can’t quit, that would be a total waste of my mental resources.

But it’s hard, because not getting paid is at some point not just demotivating but also a sure way of becoming breadless. And as a proper German I love proper bread and yes, I also really would love to have a horse one day, because I’m still a little zookeeper at heart and a little girl at times as well and girls and zookeepers love horses and horses love bread, so this must be a sign. But I’m getting distracted again.

I’m a typical victim of my generation. I too feel that desperate need to create something unique and to be something no one has ever been before me. I’m painfully aware that none of my experiences and dreams are special in itself, but my individual combination of those has, without a doubt, never before existed in another person. The same is true for every viewer of a piece of art, and exactly that is what makes every artwork unique in return. Not the work itself, but the individual sum of parts of the one that painted it and of all the people that look at it, each on their own seeing something else. Knowing this is what drives me to do what I do, so that at the end of a very ordinary day I hopefully created something that is unique for everyone else.

We are all experiencing life together for the first and for the last time and so we should all make it count. The wall is gone, East-Berlin finally has bananas in the supermarkets and I can be a painter by trade. But I can’t do that without you. I can’t do it without people realizing that painting might be fun on one hand but hard work nonetheless on the other. Painting is a solitary profession, but at the end of the day it’s up to everyone else that is not me to make my work count. I hope that people see that I’m bloody serious about this and that I will be given the chance to do what they, my mother and my grandmother, couldn't.

Every step in my life has led me here, even when I sometimes tried to walk backwards and sideways. I belong here, I like to think that I have earned it by now and I truly hope that one day I can tell my own child that he/she/it could become a painter and have enough bread at the same time.