Hi, I’m Marianne. You can see me in one of the Moby Dick photos...

I created my first „monumental painting“ in our basement which I turned into an aquarium in 1999. „Naive“ fish are now swimming on the walls. For this painting I used wall paint.

Some time later, the public swimming pool “Moby Dick” in Rülzheim was reopened after a one-year refurbishment period, and the architect had left many blank walls ready for painting…

As the pool attendants had already seen photos of our basement aquarium and also those of the jungle (wolf and snake ) which I painted in Ludwigshafen in 2000/01, they thought that the blank walls in the swimming pool needed some color such as fish paintings. So they handed me a telephone number in May 2001. The person behind this number turned out to be a member of the municipal council who also wanted to have some “life” on these boring blank walls. In July then, he and the mayor of Rülzheim visited our basement aquarium and agreed to my proposal to paint a wall free of charge and just for fun. So I started with the “Pirates’ Island” in May 2002. These wall paintings show my preference for vibrant colors and clear contours.

When I think back I have always painted something. To earn some extra money, at school I prepared posters: for demos, for other pupils, for the theater group of our parish. At that time, the most frequent motives were Che Guevara and class struggle slogans. Today, I prefer landscapes and plants (meadows and mountains, water and willows).

During my studies (of course something „proper“ – but nevertheless I had to earn some extra money) I produced commercial art which was printed every week in the municipal newspaper. Every now and then I also painted and lettered shop windows. Later on, I painted such important things as garage doors and walls of children’s rooms.

So far I have experimented with pencils and felt-tip pens, ink, carbon, red chalk, oil and wax crayons, oil paints and various lacquers. During my illness, I discovered collages, frottages, and water colors as therapeutic forms. In addition, I’m very interested in encaustics, a special method of painting in which colors in wax are fused to a carton with hot irons.