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Tanja        Commission your own portrait, or that of a loved one ...    by Tina Tacke, Gallery Clay at Art Quarter

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A word in own case:
Switching to FindMail went largely fine, hope we'll have it soon running smoothly. I hope you got all issues without break. If not, please give me notice. I haven't got my mail from Thursday through Saturday de to technical problems on the mail sever side, so I sure haven't got anything.

More and more ads are running for our mission, so subscribers will flock in and be easily integrated. If you enjoy my ezines, invite your friends, too ... Writing them is no easy task, though, so I decided to take a break at weekends.

Back to our image: This one is not so cute ... From the work number, you can see that it's done before the last one. Actually, there are many similarities, but the differences come more easily to mind. This one is rude, brutal, but ... if you look at it for some time, it's just beautiful and great!

It's hanging on a wall in my family's flat, and if you live with a painting, you will feel its presence, but you will most often not look directly at it. You find out when returning from vacation or when taking it off: You miss it.

Some time ago, I lay on the sofa, head in my wife's lap, TV running, I didn't care looking, my eyes wandering on that painting with no special interest. There I saw how great this painting actually is. I experienced it anew, and I wondered how anybody could do such a thing! I knew I did it myself, but I could not imagine doing it.

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Now this is art, and I am proud of it. Of course it's my thing, you don't have to like it. Being a gallerist now, I find pleasure with works of other artists, too, and I sure like many of our great masters. During the last days, I set up a new site for Tina Tacke (see sponsor ad above), inserted new images for Robert Schaefer and completed the site for Anne Stahl.

I titled the image after the fantasy animal at left. There's a snake, to be sure, and a bird. These cruel beasts, dragons or whatever, quite often look really calm or witty or funny, they represent lively functions rather than scary, and if they scare you feel that it is more like a scare in a Punch's theater - you know it is not for real.

People like cruel things in movies and literature, action, war, criminals, horror are real sellers. How come? Psychologists assume that it is the same you witness with children listening to cruel fairy tales: You sit in your mother's arm, safe and warm, and experience exiting things you know will end up happy. Remember that feeling?

It seems grown-ups need this kind of reassurance, too. Now this is a real puzzle. In our culture, we strive to be good. Well, that's ok, but to be more precise: We strive to be good only. Philosophically and semantically and ... there only can be good if there is evil. This is a very important observation: We live in a world of opposites, a world of dualities, and there is no such thing without its counterpart.

So you tend to be nice, but you are cruel, too. You tend to love only and everywhere, but you hate, too. I found it much more puzzling to accept that I had to do evil to get through life than to be kind. Being kind is easy and reassuring. Everybody likes you if you are kind. But to be able to learn, I have to be frustrated, and this means somebody will eventually be cruel to me. It may be necessary for me to improve, to learn what's important for me in my life.

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With children, you know this well. You want to be a loving and caring parent only. But the kid strives to find its limits, it has to. If you don't frustrate your child, you will serve it very bad indeed. Same is true with teachers. I was a teacher at some time of my life. I wanted to be loved by my pupils. But I had to frustrate them in order to give them a chance to improve. My school director explained it to me, I put a double burden on them if I wanted them to love me. They had to have somebody to direct their anger to.

If you see those dark impulses as purely negative, you will overlook that there is much power, too. In Punch and Judy shows there always is a crocodile to represent this vital force. Of course, the crocodile gets beaten up by Punch, and all the kids will yell. Nobody seems to see how vital and necessary the crocodile is. Think about it. Look at these pictures.