Thoughts

For Karl Peter Muller (KPM) art was his vocation, a continuing task, freedom and work at the same time. While always looking for the origins of things, he was mainly motivated by the mere reduction of whatever responded to his senses. The essence of every sensation, of everything he smelled, tasted, felt and experienced was transposed into his means of expression, in pictures, colours, words, forms and sounds. Reduction became the fuel for his tireless and powerful process of creation. Apart from the subject itself for KPM as a painter the LINE became more and more important for his development as an artist. It enabled him to see beyond his horizon as an artist as a mean of exclusion and inclusion.

He once wrote: "During the process of developing the line, I perceived a blade of grass or a straw as a much stronger line than the seismographic trembling sign of my hand. On top of that there was the reflecting light and the shadow of the grass. With that kind of logic I made my first collage of straw in Alsace, which I chose to be my home." (Also his last home)

Following that kind of logic the results were pictures, collages, texts assemblages and reliefs regarding the theme 'the grasharp'. He was always trying to find his own line. It was the school of Kokoschka that taught him how to see. Observation was the beginning of art of KPM.

Quote: "I continuously trained my vision and my drawing in order to find my own line, chasing it. Through reduction I am trying to keep out my nervous and unsteady line for letting the line to be followed until wherever it leads to, even exceeding the paper or the canvas. Just like a child. I therefore also always practiced blind-drawings because they develop a very special kind of tension. The very silent kind of tension that on canvas is caused by broken lines - the reduction - is finally leading to liberation. It is in those moments that one thinks to have found and his very own line.

I'm trying to captivate the tension of the silence through the line and its cultivation. Daily training of my vision provides me with good chances of blocking the satiation of my senses from the outside. Hence I can concentrate on the essential.

First of all one has to create base coats, on paper or canvas, that seem to have grown naturally, like skin, like the surface of a rock, like vellum. One designs his or her own shade of colours by using earthy colours and in a steady process of going back and forth one arrives at homogeneity. It's a slow, kind of meditating process. Not the quick drawing, that takes its strength through a precise visual perception. More like the routine kind of exercising, like Picasso used to do.

It is my repertoire that I am creating as an artist, and that one is me in the end. New forms develop from old ones that still remain the same. Everything exists already; nevertheless the aim is to find one's own, yet even that already exists. Therefore a find my personal emphasis hence the etymology of finding ones very own line."

Creating, drawing and painting always came first in KPM's life. Standing in front of a picture never was his dictum. On the contrary, he was seeking to be behind the picture in order to express itself in silence.

Of tremendous importance, personally and artistically, was his teaching for various academies from 1984 until 1994. Being surrounded by open minded, interested and astute human beings, whose company he sleeked and fostered all through his life, he never stopped asking himself "what do I really have to tell?"

Amongst his pupils he carefully choose the most sensitive ones to accompany him on his more profound, thematically oriented seminars and workshops in Maximiliansau. As a result of that decade he arrived at some very individual conclusions.

The following subjects were of prior interest to him and his pupils during that time: Spaces | Monuments | Shaman - priest - fetishism | Tone - colour | Descant in painting | From the bottom | Regarding the absurd, the laughable and coincidental in art | There is no such thing as coincidence | Sisyphus | Sisyphus as a cheerful person | The sum of all small steps is the way | Space installation | Stage and stage setting, personal performance | The line between figures | Working with waste | To take what is there | Onwardly - drawing, drawing - onwardly | Collage with linocut and woodcut | Text collage | Cutting lines - following the scissors | To engage with that line (Henri Matisse) | Injuries | Scraffiti and murals | Examination of our surroundings | Examination of common vita.