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Karl's website.... http://www.karl-maenz.com
As an amateur painter and photographer, Karl tries to be creative yet unpretentious; a free spirit yet responsible; curious, open and tolerant yet conscious and proud of a European multi-cultural background.
He likes his images to be free-wheeling, spontaneous, colorful, and somewhat mysterious, unexplainable or dreamlike rather than obvious.
Karl spent his childhood years in Germany, but he has traveled widely, and has lived for longer periods in the U.S., Sweden, Italy, and Switzerland. He has a formal business (MBA) education, and worked for over 30 years for a large multinational company from which he retired in 2001. He now lives with his wife Mireille in the countryside near Geneva and their cabin in the Swiss mountains. With their four children grown, he now has the opportunity to follow his extra-curricular interests: roughing it on African safaris, golf, sailing, skiing, nature and wildlife photography, painting, the study of modern history, and the occasional writing of travelogues for his friends.
Karl has been painting on and off for about 20 years, mainly to ensure a healthy equilibrium between a structured life and the need for holistic expression. His painting is mainly in watercolors and acrylics. Although often inspired by nature, it has moved over the years from figurative to abstract and now mainly non-figurative.
He recently realized that over the years he had reversed his creative process. He used to construct an image starting from an object and might abstract it as he progressed through composition, colors, etc., up to a point where it might no longer reveal its origins. He explains the new process as follows: "In my mind - my better current paintings start with the unexplainable -- chaotic forms that my spirit seems to dump onto the painting surface. Like downloading a mysterious, surrealistic dream, uninhibited by convention. Then -- as I confront the chaos -- structure, rhythm, and tension between colors begin to appear that I try to deal with without losing touch with the original inspiration -- I cannot find an obvious explanation here. I really try to stay loose all along, and sometimes I succeed in creating what is to me a real but indefinable content in the midst of chaos, and that's what dreams are, I think (at this stage some of my paintings are ruined by conscious interference ... and the dream is gone)."
Karl has named his visual art series "WINGS" to encourage viewers to fly like a bird, in a flight of free fancy, and above the banal.
K.H.Maenz
Les Pralies 22
CH-1279 Bogis-Bossey, Switzerland
home +41-22-776 5183
cellphone +41-79-691 1322
e-mail:..... maenzkh@hotmail dot com