Michael Stricker
Freelance painter
Lives and works in southern Germany
Member of the Friends of the Stuttgart State Gallery since 2013
 

I've been painting for a good 25 years. In the beginning it was simple watercolors and pastels, but soon pictures in oils and now also gouache were added. It is still the landscapes and nature that are the focus of my representational painting. But animals and especially people can be seen more and more frequently. The colors become stronger and stronger, break away more and more from the real model and increase their expressiveness. But despite all the further development, the strong brushstroke remains to a certain extent style-forming.
A certain abstraction is what I strive for. But the way there is difficult and long.

While I used to paint only "en plein air", that is, in front of nature, it is only recently that I have come to know and appreciate the advantages of painting in a secure, closed space. I am self-taught, but still had the pleasure of receiving art lessons from Utz Föll, a student of Manfred Henninger, for a few years at the Max Born Gymnasium in Backnang. And Henninger was in turn a student of the Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka! Perhaps it was Utz Föll who once awakened the "artist's soul in me"? In any case, I see myself with a twinkle in the tradition of these outstanding artists ...