Grith Ludwig: Navigator of the unknown

 

“Anyone know where danish painter Grith Ludwig is?”. Amongst the results that google provides when one writes her name in the search bar (apart from a couple of news, official website, LinkedIn profile), that question can be found published in the Yahoo! Answers page. Someone named Tony was looking for clues about her location. “I live in Toronto —he wrote—, I saw Grith Ludwig at the St. Lawrence Market a week ago, but due to crowds I lost her. She is a long lost friend. Anyone know of her whereabouts in Denmark or Toronto, México or California even? Am getting old. Miss my lost friends”.

 

Grith Ludwig’s story is atattched to the sea. She was born and raised beside the nordic ocean, in which she used to sail with her father and family most of her life. “I loved being on/ in the wáter —she told me during our interview on a terrace in Cuernavaca’s downtown—. It’s the only thing i miss here. I need to go visit the beach all the me”. Like the sea waves, Grith has been constantly moving during all her life.

 

At the age of thirteen, without any previous arts education, she was capable of drawing perfect realistic portraits of anybody, as if they were photographs. “I used to say: ‘Oh, my god!, how can I do this?, —she was telling me, with her energetic and willful voice of a eternally fascinated girl scout—. And I used to say to myself: ‘I don’t know. But I’m going to keep on doing it!’.” After being accepted, despite her young age, in a painting and drawing school in Copenhagen, she traveled to Toronto, Canada, to continue her art studies. There she worked as an art director, graphic artist, designer, illustrator and eventually got her PhD in Art Education. She stayed to live there for 15 years, but she has lived around the world all her life: Copenhagen, Toronto, Los Angeles, Colombia, New York, México. Her life is change. Today she lives in Cuernavaca, and she just presented her exhibition “International Transition’s of the Spirit and the Soul” in Cuernavaca City’s Museum (MuCiC). Nevertheless, the works that can be observed in that exhibition are very different and far away from that first pictoric infancy step; innate, natural, realistic… One good day, inspiration woke her up and made her put aside the commodity of her figurative talent.

 

“I started to paint abstract expressionism thirty years ago, maybe forty —she told me—. Because one day, when I sat down making an illustration (I love it, I still love it, I can do them very well, it’s not that…), all of a sudden I realized everything was technique, technique, technique!… I was born able to do it, yes, but… where was my soul?, where was my spirit?, where was my heart in all that? And then I had a fabulous dream: I dreamed how I was going to paint. Abstract, with all those colors… and I woke up and said: ‘My god!, I hope I’m able to paint like that!’.”

 

Thereby, Grith Ludwig began a new expedion. Risky and stormy, but noble, sincere and necessary.

 

Traveling transforms. There’s something inside the traveler that expands and liberates, that grows and shits while suffering seeking to go out to the surface to share itself as a truth of frightening beauty. To wander the world as Grith does, that is, to stay, to become pa and then leave again, makes identity deconstruct itself to feed on what’s different, to survive in cultures that is distinct to our own, to communicate with the other. Traveling is to identity what art is to conscience. In one of her exhibitions in Toronto, a musician approached to have a look at one of her abstract paintings and said to her: “I don’t understand it, but I know how to play it. I can play it with my instrument and then I’ll understand it. But just by looking at it I know I can play it.”

 

Grith grew up in a musical environment. Her father, like her, was a prodigy who at the age of six was able to play the piano perfectly, my brother and sister as well. We (musicians and painters) work with the soul, with the spirit; we transform things for other people, so they can see them, hear or touch them. You see –says Ludwig, looking at me with feline eyes-, with abstract art I paint my feelings, my soul, my heart. I was doing realism since I was very small, and by the me I was thirty years old I needed more, something more to express, express, express how I felt. There’s also technique for the abstract; you must work very very hard on your paintings to finally feel like you’re painting emotions. It’s like working with your subconscious. When you’re painting realism you don’t need your subconscious: you paint what you see. But with abstract art you paint what you feel. And what I like about that is to get in touch with the unknown. So, sometimes I am almost in a trance, you understand?, and I can bring that out from inside of me. I taught myself to work with the universe. No one can teach you that –emphasizes a PhD in Art Education and fine art-. No one.” Since more than a decade, Grith is devoting exclusively to create her own images. While painting, her concentration must be so focused that she does not allow anyone or anything to accompany her in her studio, neither noises or words. She told me that the only thing that can accompany her are Beethoven’s piano pieces. While painting, Grith remembers her late father at times.

 

Her strokes are unpredictable. They try to make visible something that can’t be seen, something common to all, universal feelings and sensations shared. Her images talk about instability and change, about drama and conflict, clash and permanence, of her constant migration toward strange places, about the dynamic of the oceans upon which she, used to sail for years.

 

“Traveling opens your eyes, gives you a wide horizon. The horizon, the one that I love. Instead of having a normal horizon this size –says Grith holding between thumb and index a piece of air-, gives you an enormous horizon that applies to everything in the world. That is the biggest thing that going mobile gives to you: traveling puts things in perspective. To be observant is part of my job. The universe is abstract and also are all the countries in the world. It is just as if the need for traveling enters into your blood. It’s fascinating: you know these people from everywhere… if you spend enough me somewhere, that is where you find the pleasure, that is where the beauty of traveling is, where there’s no suffering but happiness, because those people will be your new family, they become so close that they share everything, because they feel just like you; they also come from other parts of the world, they become a new family and that’s extraordinary. That is a great present.” In her search, Grith, speaker of seven languages, has discovered that, despite the cultural barriers, we are not that different in many ways.

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But don’t you feel the need to root somewhere ? - I asked-. 

 

“That’s what I’m asking myself. Yesterday I realized –she answered-. I had to move over to another house at a very busy moment, It gave me a bit of a crisis: after four years I had to move to another house and I didn’t had me and it was very stressful. So I found a good place, It’s very beautiful but I need to move again after that because I didn’t have enough me. And because of that I was thinking: I need roots now, I want roots. That’s another important thing about traveling all the me, you know? That is what makes you feel very insecure sometimes. I forgot that roots were what I was lacking. You can get confused out there because you loose your roots, and you feel lost! You sit down and you’re alone in the whole world. I’ve always had a home in every country I le. Then I move to live into another place, but I keep the one I built there. What happens having so many countries is that I always miss someone that is in another, and in another, and in another, and I go and visit them there, where I spent so many years before, when I have me… But the thing about the roots and missing people… you know who loves it? My work. My painting loves me crying, loves me suffering for missing my family and my friends from all over the world”.

 

Is it necessary for an artist to suffer? –I insisted, as a french man filled Grith’s glass with water-.

 

“That’s a good question, that is what they always say –she answered thoughtfully looking at her glass, now full-. And I think that maybe it’s true. I don’t know if it’s necessary, but it happens. When I was young and moving from one country to another, I used to spend a lot of me in every one of them(years). So you root, and then you uproot, to keep going, and you root again, and uproot again. Now I have been here for four years, so I’m kind of rooted, but my house… now I have to leave it and root in another area, another house. It’s almost like if, when I was young, I had to get out of all those places to discover another new place in which to suffer again… but I did not use to think of it as suffering, I saw it as the need of a new challenge, and I still do sometimes, If I had already made it all perfect staying somewhere, if I had worked and everything was perfect I needed something new –she said, snapping her fingers-. That’s what happens, that’s what accelerates your pulse when you travel. But luckily, it stays within you, it stays there and feeds your work. It teaches you so much because it makes you spend me on your own. There are a lot of things that can scare you, you can feel insecure about so many things because no one can help you with anything, because normally no one tries it. So you can go and talk to them but they can’t give you any advice. So you are completely alone and you have to figure it out, but how do you figure it out? Sometimes it can be terrifying”.

 

A couple of weeks ago Grith Ludwig became a permanent resident of Mexico. For some reason, she told me, in México she feels spiritual all the me: I am a very spiritual person, but I take what I like from any religion. Before, after about a year staying in Denmark, which is my country of origin, I felt the need to move again. It’s hard to explain, to feel that spirituality again, but I can feel it over here all the me! It’s very important for me because I feel at home with myself and I can feel my spirit. México is incredible. I like the quiet areas, like the one I live in, but I also love going to México City. There’s a lot of chaos going on but it’s beautiful, with amazing buildings, its fantastic.  

 

There is something in Grith Ludwig’s paintings that will always remain young. Traveling is a bold example of renovation. Even herself has noted that at mes, young people understand her work before the older people do. “When I work, I have to surprise myself. If i’m painting and I don’t surprise myself, I carry on until the surprise arrives –she told me-. You have to take your me to look at the painting. The painting should ask you: what do you feel? What I feel while I paint it is mine. It’s not supposed to make you should feel what I feel while I paint it”. A canvas from Grith Ludwig is an ocean of possibilities, as eloquent as the spots on a majestic wild tiger.

 

Writen by Diego Gama Cartelera Cultural, issue:

September 2015

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