Chitchat: Malte Dinkela
Your Full Name
Malte Dinkela
Tell us about you.
I started painting right after high-school diploma that I made in a boarding school. I had to work at McDonalds to finance my work.
After a while the situation changed and I got more and more income from painting. I got some exhibitions in Kansas City, New York, Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Then, in 2007 I had a hard break in my work as an artist and started to spend all my energy, quiet successful, to the “free economy” (Too long story for now, but time as an artist stood still).
Then, a few weeks ago, something strange happened to me. I got deliver from the absence of art, got kissed, like the princess in Rosebud (Sleeping Beauty) from Brother Grimm. At least one and hopefully more pictures will come into being from this accidentally touch. And also this is the reason why I’m answering to your questions right now. Sorry for delay but I was sleeping!
In your opinion, what would be the secret ingredients to become a great painter?
You should ask a great painter, not me. But I could imagine that there are three necessary aspects. First one is to be born at the right moment. Second one is, to get into a situation that claims political and artistically/visual involvement.
Third one is to resist these sometimes hard circumstances and have the patience, to look forward and make something beautiful out of the situation you got thrown into.
Where are you located?
Germany.
What is the most fascinating part of being an painter?
Speaking through your hands.
Where do you get inspirations from?
Women and history of art. Especially the first.
Do you promote/ sell/ showcase your work? If so, how?
As a self-taught artist the situation in Germany is very complicated. We have a strong hierarchy in the art market and the biography is the most important part of your work. That sounds strange, but the first view from a German gallery goes not to your pictures. Their questions are: Where did you study, who was your teacher, why did you sell your pictures on Ebay and why didn’t you paint for 5 years. I think the reason for this is that they need an argument to sell these pictures to their customers.
They can’t do gut decisions because than they don’t have a reasonable argument, why this is good or not. It’s much easier to sell a picture if you can tell: This is a good picture, because the artist studied in the school of xyz and all other artist of this school are good, too. You can be sure that the value of this work will increase in the next 10 years.
What is your long range goals in your life?
Allow the coincidence to keep in touch with my life.
Who is an painter that you look up to? Why so?
Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Egon Schiele, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, the abstract expressionist.
Describe a difficult work/ project situation and how would you overcome it?
In the preparatory phase, where you decide about the next subject of your work it demands instinctive feeling and a special kind of slowness. If you are too fast, you will destroy your subject and you won’t get it to a visual expression. To avoid this, I try to enrich myself with other things in this phase and find corresponding intersections between my subject and totally different doings.
In the practical phase, painting always is in the sense of the word a tightrope walk. Every line you paint is there. If you do a wrong step, you done it and you have to deal with it. It’s unerasable there and you have a new situation in your work. At the same time this accidents and mistakes could give prospects to the work you never could imagine and plan.
What do you think about the Internet and how it is affecting our lifestyle?
I live quiet free of internet, television and other media. On one hand they are taking a lot of time and energy from you and keep you away from really important things. Also I’m not really interested to share on facebook, that I have a pain in my stomach this morning.
On the other hand it really affected me, that people under hard political situations, like in the Middle East, used the internet as a political instrument. So it seems that it depends on the use of these new technics. On one side it just helps people to feed there ego on their retreat into their personal attitude and on the other side it could be used as a serious tool for political behavior.
If you could turn back time, how would you do things differently?
Turning back the time is against my principles. All what I have done would get arbitrary.
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How do you keep your work fresh? Do you need to consciously adapt your style or does it progress naturally?
Style is something like the voice. It’s “natural” given, doesn’t change through the time. It’s seductive and maybe dangerous to keep your work on a level of “style”. From my view it’s much more important, to train your skills. The skills of your hand and especially the skill of your eyes and your perception. This might be the way to originate something in your work.
Name 3 of your favorite (art) books/ magazines.
Magazine: Kunstforum International, books: It changes from month to month, but I think the most read book is from David Sylvester: Interviews with Francis Bacon.
In what kind of a work environment do you do your best work?
At the moment more in my kitchen than in my studio.
What do you like the sound of? Why so?
I like cold autumns in old cottages, where the wind is whistling, the rain is dropping against the windows and I’m in my warm bed and listen to these sounds. That’s amazing.
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