Landscape flights with Zuzanna Skiba
Zuzanna Skiba’s studio is located in the north of Berlin in a former police station – with long corridors and an eerily heavy entrance door. What strikes us immediately is that there’s a very special smell in the air. What could that be? When Zuzanna opens her studio door for us, we see what it smells like: oil paint and solvents lined up in a corner of the room. There are also paintings in muted tones hanging all over the walls, and Zuzanna has even done a fine pencil drawing directly on the white walls. What makes us a little queasy is the stuffed stork in the corner. But Zuzanna explains to us that this faithful companion, once given to her as a gift, has already brought her great luck and has a lot to do with her work. In order to find out what she means by that, we let her tell us a little bit first...
Zuzanna learned a profession that no longer exists today. She trained as a cartographer and used a magnifying glass and a drawing pen – a special drawing tool that allows the width of the line to be set precisely – to draw landscapes in great detail and to create (land) maps with forests, rivers and mountains. But how do you actually draw elevations as seen from above, when everything looks flat? She explains that cartography uses a lot of hatching to show heights and depths. A lot of fine lines show how the landscape runs, and the closer the lines are to each other on a drawn mountain, for example, the higher and steeper it is. When Zuzanna later switched to art, she of course did not forget the techniques she had learned, and her interest in seeing and understanding the world from above has remained. She says, “I paint like a bird!” That’s when we realize why she feels so connected to the stork – after all, it always chooses the highest point to nest and looks down on the world from above.
Painting is as important to Zuzanna as eating, drinking, sleeping – she simply needs it to be happy, to sort out her thoughts and to look at the world again and again. (Exhausting – especially physically – is only the preparatory work, because she builds the stretcher frames herself and also stretches the canvases alone). Before she starts painting, she slips into an old (it couldn’t be more appropriate) aviator suit, because with the oil paint you get your hands pretty dirty. We quickly notice this ourselves when Zuzanna hands us a dried blob of paint.
Zuzanna’s artwork shows fantasy landscapes, and as she works, the image takes on a life of its own. Sometimes it takes her only a few hours to complete a painting, but for some it takes years or decades. Then the painting becomes quite thick due to the many layers of oil paint (“pastos” is what it’s called – a restorer once explained to Zuzanna that the paint would dry for a lifetime the way she paints). She paints the layers of oil paint first and then puts a graphic drawing of many fine strokes on it. This structure reminds us of sea, clouds, feathers or fur – in any case, something organic and moving. It also looks like the structure goes on and on, and the eye literally flies over the surface! Later, we practice Zuzanna’s bird’s eye and draw the path from the school to the studio from above, each separately. What’s exciting is that although we all had the same assignment and were supposed to draw the same path, each of us perceived and depicted her environment differently. Zuzanna thinks that’s great, because she also uses different tricks to perceive things differently all the time: She often turns her pictures upside down, looks through her eyelashes... or just puts herself in the place of a bird. We plan to do the same in the future!
When we leave, Zuzanna waves to us from the window and says that now she really sees us from above. When asked how she would draw us, she replies, “As little dots!” And who knows – maybe we will discover ourselves in one of her next pictures?
