Wolfgang Hannen

Biographical data

I was born on March 8, 1951 in Krefeld on the Lower Rhine.

After 4 years of elementary school, I follow 8 years of Waldorf school in Krefeld, for 3 years I work as a nursing assistant in the hospital and during this time I get my Abitur in evening school. Then I do the civil peace service in a children's and youth home.

I am studying for 3 years at the Free University for Art, Art Therapy and Education in Ottersberg (Lower Saxony) with a focus on sculpture.

This is followed by a “master class year” with K.H.Eisele in Schorndorf (Baden-Württemberg). Then life as a freelance artist begins in different places and contexts. I am a freelancer at the Institute for Contemporary Social Issues in Bremen, give courses and lessons for the University of Oldenburg, run an organic wine trade for 9 years, organize cultural events and raise my children.

The description of a search or an inner résumé

This is the condensed version of a description of my path as a searching artist. Many people have accompanied me on this path. Without the encounters with them, their benevolence or their resistance, their love, recognition and criticism, this life is inconceivable for me! They were saving angels, initiators, teachers, masters, life partners. I thank all of you.

I am writing this text in the present tense. In my look at my previous life, the important stations appear at the same time, as translucent banners form more and more a fitting image that is not closed, but is open and remains unpredictable.

As a fourteen-year-old schoolboy I have a wake-up experience and a vision: I draw a moor landscape with soft charcoal, very absorbed and with growing joy about what is happening. I am very astonished at a rising feeling of happiness. I have never experienced this clear joy before. And the decision immediately grows in me: I will become a painter. But at the same moment I have before me the image of an older man who is the realization of my wish and decision. And so it will come. Many years of confusion and searching pass until, as a 45-year-old man, I stand in front of a turbulent storm landscape painting in my small, poorly-lit studio and realize as if struck by lightning: Now I am the painter that I see in my mind's eye as a fourteen-year-old see!

When I tried painting as an 18-19 year old, in a time - desperate and cut off from the world, I had confusing experiences: the forces of colors are powerful, confusing, chaotic, but beguilingly beautiful. I feel helpless at the mercy of the colors. It is a strong force that touches me deeply. And the longing grows to explore the energies of the color world, to understand and to connect with them. The colors become the most important point of contact with the world and at the same time with myself.

In search of spiritual orientation for these my experiences I find three goals: The mystical immersion in the Christ words of the Gospel of John, the writings of R. Steiner: “The Philosophy of Freedom” and “How to gain knowledge of higher worlds”. And I discover pioneering pictures on my forays through the museums: in London the pictures by William Turner and in Amsterdam pictures by Vincent van Gogh. Here I find two polar formulations of light in painting.

After studying art, I have to free myself from all theoretical systems on color, space and art, and find my own work through self-awareness. I live as a painting, meditating hermit in my studios in different places and start with the self-experiment “color”. For a long time I expose myself to the effect of a color: 3, 4, 5 months violet or blue or red ..., meditating, visualizing, observing nature, painting monochrome on large canvases. The changes, experiences in me are profound, the access to the color energies, to the soul and spiritual backgrounds is becoming more and more direct, right up to their work in the so-called physical body. On this color journey, this too becomes more and more concrete to an energetic organism.

From these experiences the question arises: “How can I deal with the colors so that the creative energies can be experienced by the viewer? I am not interested in the motif, but in the purely emotional and spiritual potency expressed. And so the opening of the “space of perception” becomes the real theme of my art.

The perspective fiction between the viewer and the object to be viewed needs to be cracked in favor of a purely spiritual experience of the creative energy that is expressed in the colors. The proportions between the colored marking and the gaps on the surface or in the room are set in such a way that the field of perception or field of vision opens up to “aperspectival seeing” (cf. J.Gepser: aperspectival awareness in “origin and present”). Not seeing or feeling red, but experiencing it directly as energy in the open space of consciousness, is the aim of the artistic formulations in this phase of my search.

A crisis comes up, I can't go any further, I'm pulling out of it Art happening back. The sudden death of my wife, a stroke of my own that restricted my field of vision, then a heart operation are major turning points in my life.

The inner connection to the energies of life helps me back into life and on the background of these experiences I start to turn to the colors again. I begin to practice Buddhist tantra meditations intensively and to develop purely energetic color surface configurations by painting.

The pictures that are now accessible are the result of this work.I was born on March 8, 1951 in Krefeld on the Lower Rhine.

After 4 years of elementary school, I follow 8 years of Waldorf school in Krefeld, for 3 years I work as a nursing assistant in the hospital and during this time I get my Abitur in evening school. Then I do the civil peace service in a children's and youth home.

I am studying for 3 years at the Free University for Art, Art Therapy and Education in Ottersberg (Lower Saxony) with a focus on sculpture.

This is followed by a “master class year” with K.H.Eisele in Schorndorf (Baden-Württemberg). Then life as a freelance artist begins in different places and contexts. I am a freelancer at the Institute for Contemporary Social Issues in Bremen, give courses and lessons for the University of Oldenburg, run an organic wine trade for 9 years, organize cultural events and raise my children.

The description of a search or an inner résumé

This is the condensed version of a description of my path as a searching artist. Many people have accompanied me on this path. Without the encounters with them, their benevolence or their resistance, their love, recognition and criticism, this life is inconceivable for me! They were saving angels, initiators, teachers, masters, life partners. I thank all of you.

I am writing this text in the present tense. In my look at my previous life, the important stations appear at the same time, as translucent banners form more and more a fitting image that is not closed, but is open and remains unpredictable.

As a fourteen-year-old schoolboy I have a wake-up experience and a vision: I draw a moor landscape with soft charcoal, very absorbed and with growing joy about what is happening. I am very astonished at a rising feeling of happiness. I have never experienced this clear joy before. And the decision immediately grows in me: I will become a painter. But at the same moment I have before me the image of an older man who is the realization of my wish and decision. And so it will come. Many years of confusion and searching pass until, as a 45-year-old man, I stand in front of a turbulent storm landscape painting in my small, poorly-lit studio and realize as if struck by lightning: Now I am the painter that I see in my mind's eye as a fourteen-year-old see!

When I tried painting as an 18-19 year old, in a time - desperate and cut off from the world, I had confusing experiences: the forces of colors are powerful, confusing, chaotic, but beguilingly beautiful. I feel helpless at the mercy of the colors. It is a strong force that touches me deeply. And the longing grows to explore the energies of the color world, to understand and to connect with them. The colors become the most important point of contact with the world and at the same time with myself.

In search of spiritual orientation for these my experiences I find three goals: The mystical immersion in the Christ words of the Gospel of John, the writings of R. Steiner: “The Philosophy of Freedom” and “How to gain knowledge of higher worlds”. And I discover pioneering pictures on my forays through the museums: in London the pictures by William Turner and in Amsterdam pictures by Vincent van Gogh. Here I find two polar formulations of light in painting.

After studying art, I have to free myself from all theoretical systems on color, space and art, and find my own work through self-awareness. I live as a painting, meditating hermit in my studios in different places and start with the self-experiment “color”. For a long time I expose myself to the effect of a color: 3, 4, 5 months violet or blue or red ..., meditating, visualizing, observing nature, painting monochrome on large canvases. The changes, experiences in me are profound, the access to the color energies, to the soul and spiritual backgrounds is becoming more and more direct, right up to their work in the so-called physical body. On this color journey, this too becomes more and more concrete to an energetic organism.

From these experiences the question arises: “How can I deal with the colors so that the creative energies can be experienced by the viewer? I am not interested in the motif, but in the purely emotional and spiritual potency expressed. And so the opening of the “space of perception” becomes the real theme of my art.

The perspective fiction between the viewer and the object to be viewed needs to be cracked in favor of a purely spiritual experience of the creative energy that is expressed in the colors. The proportions between the colored marking and the gaps on the surface or in the room are set in such a way that the field of perception or field of vision opens up to “aperspectival seeing” (cf. J.Gepser: aperspectival awareness in “origin and present”). Not seeing or feeling red, but experiencing it directly as energy in the open space of consciousness, is the aim of the artistic formulations in this phase of my search.

A crisis comes up, I can't go any further, I'm pulling out of it Art happening back. The sudden death of my wife, a stroke of my own that restricted my field of vision, then a heart operation are major turning points in my life.

The inner connection to the energies of life helps me back into life and on the background of these experiences I start to turn to the colors again. I begin to practice Buddhist tantra meditations intensively and to develop purely energetic color surface configurations by painting.

The pictures that are now accessible are the result of this work.