Small magnificent bird

Image interpretation

Small in format, great in impact: a bird stretches its beak upward, as if listening to a sound only it can hear. The actual painting—delicate, precious, concentrated—sits like a window in the middle of a vast, night-blue mat, which Ri Meuser von Eschmar painted herself. A cloud of warm gold bursts forth from the rectangular frame, pouring over the blue in free brushstrokes and turning the mat into a continuation of the work. Handwritten marks and lines accompany this golden movement—they appear like a language in the process of emerging, a script in the throes of creation. The deep navy blue of the background inevitably brings the open sea to mind—and, in fact, Ri Meuser von Eschmar knew this blue of the infinite from her own experience: she accompanied deep-sea fishing expeditions off Iceland and Greenland, and it is not difficult to sense the glow of the North Atlantic in this nocturnal blue. The small, magnificent bird at the center is no domesticated animal; it is a creature of the vastness.

Technique: Mono Sgraffito

What makes this work so special is the radical expansion of the pictorial space: the mono sgraffito does not end at the edge of the painting here, but continues into the hand-painted mat. Ri Meuser von Eschmar applied her pigments—warm ochre, sparkling gold, delicate blue-gray—in several layers onto the wafer-thin film of the actual work, scraped individual layers away again, and glazed over them repeatedly until the bird emerged from the depth of the layers. The gold dust that bursts from the rectangular image and pours over the blue mat unites both levels into a single, cohesive overall object. In mono sgraffito, a work can consist of up to 16 such layers; here, this complexity becomes literally visible as the image transcends its own boundaries.

The Artist

Prof. Ri Meuser von Eschmar, born in Darmstadt, studied stage design in Darmstadt and painting in Aachen. As a freelance artist with a studio near Bonn, she created a completely unique technique with mono sgraffito, which combines pigments, industrial films, and gold dust into objects of extraordinary luminosity and transparency. Her fascination for the sea, the sky, and the vastness of the world was fueled by an extraordinary life: study trips to almost every continent, deep-sea fishing expeditions off Iceland and Greenland, as well as lecture tours on the Cunard Line's Queen Elizabeth 2 left lasting traces in her imagery. With over 350 solo exhibitions worldwide and awards such as the Rubens Medal and the Golden Oscar (France), she is one of the most significant German artists of the 20th century.