She Who Sings

This painting traces my personal journey of transformation through the creative process—a journey that began with a song from Der Blaue Engel. I wanted to gather several moments from this two-year path toward inner freedom and the gradual transcendence of what I had taken to be my provisional self. The painting is also a reminder that this road, however much it has already changed me, is only partially traveled.

Magnus, my cat, accompanies me to almost every singing lesson. He is not an accessory to the scene but, in my mind, a necessary part of the learning process.

The woman standing before the poster of the cabaret singer refers to a scene from Der Blaue Engel, in which a young, rough-looking woman washes a shop window behind which hangs a poster of Marlene Dietrich. My vocal teacher used the image as a metaphor: “While you are singing, you need to be the one on the poster. Until you find that freedom, you are the one washing the glass.”

The large profile recalls another stage of learning to sing. My teacher kept asking me to form the sound with what I can only describe as a kind of singer’s snarl—the mouth slightly drawn back, the teeth exposed. At the time I was still struggling with basic vocal technique and could not understand what this expression was supposed to feel like. Eventually he told me: “Sing it with a slightly mocking expression—as if you’re making fun of the whole thing.” Somehow, that made much more sense.

On the right, there is also a musical chord: the opening chord of “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt”—“I am from head to toe attuned to love”—the song from Der Blaue Engel that became the starting point of this painting and of the inner journey it records.

At the bottom, the shadow of a goat-like creature seems to leap toward a woman. It is an allusion to the cover of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, which I was reading for the third time while working on this painting. At the time I was thinking intensely about what inner freedom might require: not escaping the shadow, but allowing it into consciousness and finding a way to live with what it contains.