Heidrun Rathgeb
To mark our April 2021 online launch of eight woodcuts by Heidrun Rathgeb, the artist talks to Katherine Oliver about life in rural Germany, the close relationship between her painting and printmaking practices, and her passion for capturing ‘a certain state of being’ in her pictures.
Can you summarise your practice in one sentence for us?
My images are often about the sense of wonder that I discover in daily life.
Tell us about your surroundings in rural south Germany - how important to your practice is working from life? Does drawing upon memories also play a part in your image-making process?
I live with my family, my husband and our six children in a farmhouse not far from Lake Constance and about 45 minutes’ drive from the Alps. We can see the Alps from where we are and it’s really beautiful. We are surrounded by farmland, a lot of apple-growing orchards, and woodland. This area is really important to my work; I grew up near here before I moved away for about 12 years to Wiesbaden and then later to England; London and Dartmoor. I feel connected to the landscape. I often go out and draw or go for hikes in the Alps and draw.
Drawing is a way for me to capture moments that feel like daily epiphanies - fleeting moments that are precious that might otherwise go past unnoticed. By drawing them in my sketchbook, at least I can store them in my memory. These drawings would always be the starting point for a print or a painting, but I would never draw from nature or do long painstakingly difficult drawings. I’d rather draw a child running across a lawn or something where I have to be really quick.
In that sense, my drawings are really more about feeling rather than something analytical. I sometimes draw purely from memory……it could even be a scene from my own childhood – having breakfast with my grandparents, for example, or a memory of something I’ve seen. I’ve often drawn or painted or printed nocturnal scenes but it’s often too dark to draw outside when the moon is rising. So, I spend some time looking and remembering, and then I draw that evening or the next day from memory. I then use those memory drawings as a starting point for a painting or print.
Lit, 2020, reduction woodcut, 26.5 x 20cm, edition of 10.
Your pictures often feature members of your family. Do you see these as portraits – or are they more about humankind’s place in the world in general?
I’m not a portrait artist and have never seen myself as such - although I’ve been drawing my children for the past twenty years, almost daily. But I don’t see them as portraits; much rather, I try to capture a certain state of being. If a child is concentrating on their homework or if they’re sleeping or playing, I get a certain feeling of how they are in that moment and that’s what I like to capture. It could just be a light across the face or a silhouette of a person against the light…..it’s more about a way of being, now, in the world, in a particular place and time.
It would be my hope that these pictures will speak to people and that they can identify with them because this is something universal that we all experience. It’s nothing high-flying or special – nearly everything I do is to do with my daily life.
Leonie, 2019, woodcut, 26.5 x 20cm, edition of 10.
How do your prints relate to your paintings? Do your prints give you ideas for paintings, or vice versa?
My prints and paintings are closely linked. I will always have a sketchbook drawing that I’ll turn into a painting or print. For ten years I only made etchings, and now, with some of my paintings I think – I have to go further- I have to turn them into something else again, and that would be the starting point for a woodcut.
Especially with the reduction process I need a clear idea of composition and colour because it’s a process that can’t be reversed. I see it as a digestion process…..from a drawing, to a painting to a print – it’s always becoming something else.
Tell us what you like about the often time-consuming ritual of making woodcuts. What can you communicate using this medium that you cannot communicate in a painting?
I often turn to woodcuts when I have a clear pictorial idea in mind. It’s usually an image that I’ve previously painted, or sometimes just drawn. I make a woodcut when I feel the need for deep concentration in working……then I would rather do a woodcut than a painting because it’s more uncompromising – I have to be really focused. It’s almost requires a zen-like type of concentration – that’s what reduction woodcut demands.
Also - I do enjoy the physical process of cutting the wood. I really like the spontaneity linked with that utter concentration – it’s almost like a contradiction. I do like the tension between being spontaneous with my marks – I don’t plan everything out. I might have a rough idea of the drawing but with the lines I’m carving out, I’m very free. But at the same time, I need to be so focussed and concentrate because if I do one cut in the wrong direction, I have to start all over again and it takes a long time.
There’s one other thing with woodcuts - there is always an element of surprise there, something I can’t control. I like that because the woodcut itself speaks back to me and I have to react back again.
I’m left-handed and for some reason I always enjoyed thinking and writing in reverse even when I was a small kid. Thinking about a mirror image is something I enjoy – it’s a challenge and there’s also an element of playfulness. On the whole, I think that the process of woodcutting and printmaking stretches my imagination. I couldn’t just do painting – I need the printmaking. It’s almost like learning a new language when I do it – like a new vocabulary.
Explore the latest prints for sale by Heidrun in our online shop.
