Cathrin Hoffmann

Cathrin Hoffmann: I was traveling with my boyfriend, and we were in Leon, Nicaragua, where we rented a room in a shared house, and there was an actual table and a chair in the room for the first time during our trip. I had brought with me my graphic tablet and started drawing digitally for the first time. It was such a feeling of freedom not to have a purpose, not to have a briefing by an agency or by a client, just to think about the three months we had already traveled and drawing what we experienced. That was the first time I did that for, like, 12 hours a day. My boyfriend was going to the beach, and I sat there, drank rum, and drew.

 

No, I was afraid of the paint and the brush. But I decided to be more physical, trying to not only sit in front of the computer. I wanted to try something with real materials, so I started doing collages as well. It's cutting out and gluing and then a little bit of paint. But most of the time, I drew. I drew with pastel chalks, and that was okay. I wasn't afraid of those [laughs]. I had some really nice paintings that I made digitally, and I thought that I really wanted to see them on a big scale. So I decided to paint them and sneak in the canvas.

 

Yeah, it was terrible. Starting out, I really thought I needed to have lessons, that I needed to go to school somehow because I wouldn’t be able to learn otherwise. I realized painting is too hard. So I watched a lot of YouTube videos but that didn't help, and I had always wanted to do it correctly. Maybe that's the German part of me—I wanted to do it like a "real painter" would. I thought I had to hold my brush like Picasso. I couldn't do it, and I still can't [laughs].

 

But now I know—fuck that! Do it however you want to do it. And this is where I come back to the first thing I said—I'm happy that I didn't have lessons because I think someone else would try to push me in a direction I would not go myself. And so I learned my own way, and I'm really happy that I learned it on my own and maybe have a different look than an educated painter.

 

Perhaps people would say, ''Well, you could achieve that easily.'' But I don't care, I like that. I do a lot of things differently. I realized people would say, ''Wow, that looks very weird.'' But it works. So, in the end, that's all I need. It works and I'm happy. So now, after two years of painting, it's really easy now. Sometimes I actually do find myself holding a brush like Picasso and it's like I'm almost there.

 

That also changed because I realized it's not important to achieve that digital painting. It's not necessary. I actually gained confidence, and with being more confident, it's not important to make a copy of your reference. It's more important to convey this feeling and what I wanted to say in the painting. Not how it's blended, not how the gradient is. For me, at least, I don't care anymore about that stuff. That is also something I had to learn.

 

Yeah, and to figure out what is important to you. Obviously I don’t have great technical skills but I also don't care a lot. It's only important on a specific level. Being well skilled doesn't add emotion to a painting—for me, at least. I realized that a bad brush stroke can create more feelings than a perfectly blended stroke or whatever. But I had to learn that. This perfection I used to have before always led me to a different direction and I lost track because of that. I used to think it was important to make a perfectly crafted painting. This was an ambivalence and a conflict. It was always like being on a battlefield with myself.

 

I feel better [laughs].

Yeah, because I got to know a lot of the artists and I realized they are just people, and this is so good. Especially in observing their paintings, coming closer, driven by the graphic designer in me, just to find mistakes or just to observe the technique. And realizing it still doesn't matter, because the emotion you had when you first saw the painting had nothing to do with the technique. So why would you care now? So learning that from other paintings by other artists, was very helpful. That and being able to talk about it all helped me realize what's important to me in my work.

 

So, there was no concept really, but now, since I have been talking more about my art, I realize I am always driven by the idea of humanity in general, actually. What is humanity about? How did we become what we are? And how are we at this point? What is important to us in terms of society? How is technology changing society? Does it change real humans? Does it change us, or are we still thinking of the same things that philosophers from the past wondered about? When I start drawing, it is very intuitive, but I think it has always been driven by the big question, Why? Though it's hard to really know.

 

It depends. Sometimes, I think it's not important to give them eyes. It's funny because, when I start drawing or sketching, I do a lot of variants. So you might know one painting, but you don't know the many variants I did before that. Sometimes these variants have eyes, sometimes no eyes. I try to create a specific feeling, which I can't really identify. When I don't react to my own painting, when I don't have a feeling about it, when it's like, “Ah,” for me, then I have to go on and work on it. Sometimes the eyes won't help, sometimes the eyes distract, I think. For example, when an eye is looking in a direction, that means something. When the painting looks at your own eyes, that has a meaning. And sometimes I don't want that layer of meaning, I want something else. This is when I avoid giving them eyes.

Well, I am German, but you see my face and I don't look German, right? I think it comes from a personal reality I had. I grew up in a very small town and I did not have very bad racist things happen to me, but a lot of little things constantly. I was always the not-German girl in class because I was the only one with black hair. So I dyed my hair a little bit lighter, I don't know if you can see that. And this is what I really don't like. My dad is German, he's blond, and he is very left wing, I would say. My mom is from Iran, and so I grew up always being in conflict between German and the Persian cultures and being perceived differently. That hurt me, of course, because racism sucks. And now to see our society growing more and more in that direction is very painful for me personally. I would say I'm not really a political person in terms of knowing all about what’s going on in politics. Maybe I'm not very well-informed sometimes, but I have a very strong urge to do something. I go to demonstrations a lot. I go to the streets. I try to do the little things, and yes, racism is a big thing for me personally, as well.

 

Actually, I think you're right. It's not the main thing I have in my mind, but now that you have said it out loud, I would agree. So, yes, it's not like this is my concept and I do it, but I have a very strong feeling to speak up. It's not only because of my heritage but also, I have a mentally disabled twin brother, so he is “different” as well. And I was always fighting for him, to show everyone that he is not different. So I have a big goal to try and be inclusive. I struggle to not see differences, but I do see them, of course. We are all a bit different. This is a human thing. I can also be very judgmental, too quickly sometimes, and I hate that as well.

 

When I started working on that show and I thought about the concept behind it, I came across a quote from the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard that I knew of for a long time. He was questioning the world, basically: the big “Why?” that I was talking about before. The questions like, Why are we here? Why am I here? What is it all about? “I stick my finger in existence —it smells of nothing.” That is a part of the original quote, and I liked it so much. I was already carrying this quote around for a while, and I remembered it while I was working on the London show. During this isolation and the pandemic, this quote felt even more relevant. Because I was like, “You know what? When I stick my finger in existence right now, it still smells of nothing.” And we are hundreds of years apart from when he originally said that. This is a very short, compressed form of that story because it took a while until I came to that point. One of the paintings is actually titled I Stick My Finger in Existence.

No, no one. Isn't it strange? No one. People were asking me if this is about Covid-19 and the loss of smell and taste. But, actually, no, I was not aware of those symptoms back then, so actually it's a coincidence. 

 

It was actually one of the first things I created for the show. And I was not sure if I wanted to put them in the show because I was not sure if they were good enough. Again, that perfection thing. I thought, “Well, yes, you enjoy it, why not?”

 

Yeah. I don't have anyone here who could help me. I would love to have someone, but I have to do that all on my own. I always liked crafting and physical work. When I was young, I built tree houses on my own and things like that. I built a rabbit cage on my own, poor rabbit. It was like a haunted rabbit house. So I felt like I could do a sculpture because I love working with my hands anyway, even more than doing these very delicate parts. I like this rough stuff more, actually, using a hammer and wood, things like that.

 

My plan for the coming future is actually doing more sculptures. I don't want to give up painting, but I would love to experiment more with sculpting. I think it is because I never felt like a real painter. I didn't really care about the medium at all, but I realized what a sculpture does to me as someone that sees it, that it’s as important to me as what the painting does.