Climbing pines and fairy tale trees

"Look here, doesn't the knot hole look like an eye? And there, the bulge in the bark, that is the nose!" Eagerly my brother and I searched for the face on the bark of the tree, to which our father pointed during the Sundays walk. We were set on climbing trees and looked between tree roots for Easter eggs. For us children, the forest was full of mystical trees. Sometimes they were not friendly to humans, so they let them stumble over their roots, get lost in the forest and tore their dresses up with their branches, but mostly they were friendly and helped humans. This we learned from several children’s books - for example the "Grimms fairy tales" and "Ronja robber daughter". I loved Denmark and Holland vacations, because there were often amazing Pine trees for climbing nearby the holiday houses. Sometimes I climbed so high, until I could swing with the treetop in the wind.

Again and again I painted the theme "girl in tree". Most are unfinished, because painting the sheets was too much work (see gallery). For one of my pictures I got a prize in a painting competition of the Deutsche Bank on the subject "human and nature".

Gallery