When I paint someone's portrait, I always feel as if I am getting to know this person. I prefer painting people I do not know yet so as to be able to see them in an unprejudiced way and get to know them from scratch.

When it comes to my portraits of women from all over the world, I take aesthetic pleasure in capturing the colourful jewellery and clothes or the simplicity of women from different cultures. As reflections of these cultures, I also find every-day situations in those women’s lives fascinating, for example how they prepare their meals, how they interact with each other, how they carry their infants etc.

While painting these women, I imagine myself in the countries where they come from and I think about what kind of lives they might live and how they might cope with their every-day tasks in their culture. It does not make any difference whether or not I know the country where the women I paint come from or whether I have taken the photograph from which I paint myself or have obtained it from another source. Women from other cultures always exert a certain kind of fascination on me.

In my portraits of athletes and artists, I try to reflect the charisma which for me they have in different situations of their professional lives, be it a performance on stage or the moment of victory in a sports competition. Whether it is the triumph of an athlete, the body of a dancer defying gravity or a musician lost in a melody, these are all moments of great emotion which I try to capture. ...continue