From wild to tranquil painting

So there she stood, Gitte Buch, an art teacher at Langeland Art College (1983–2001), looking at the enormous canvases with their wild brushstrokes and thinking: “It rings hollow”.

Her painting courses were otherwise a great success. There was rock music playing, red wine in the glasses, and the students expressed themselves vocally by shouting and screaming; one moment they were so enthusiastic about their own achievements that they felt ready for exhibitions in New York and Berlin, only to be on the verge of tears the next minute over a lack of inspiration, a lack of skill, a lack of purpose.

“But I myself was, of course, partly responsible for creating these huge egos,” Gitte Buch admits honestly. She, too, had been swept up by the spirit of the times in the early 1980s – ‘the wild youth’.

Painting, which had otherwise been declared dead on the art scene, was given a second chance and experienced a spectacular resurgence. So, in the workshops and studios where the young, black-clad artists worked, paint was splashed onto canvases that could never be big enough – and, as Gitte Buch explains, anyone could join in. For there were no requirements for either knowledge of materials or artistic skills.

“Whilst I was a teacher, I had absolutely no time to paint myself. I was worn out, but in reality I didn’t think I was good enough. Because I had no authority to fall back on and could only go round playing the role of a first-aider, encouraging the pupils when they were despondent and feeling utterly low, or suggesting they turn the painting a quarter of a turn if they’d simply reached a dead end. There was noise and music and a wellspring of emotions – but what I needed most was peace and quiet and a chance to lose myself in my work.”

The Icons

When Pastor Søren Pral came to give a talk on the images in the Bible, it proved to be a turning point for Gitte Buch, even though she initially thought that the small, plump man in a waistcoat, with a pocket watch and spectacles, would be a flop. But he radiated love, and all the pupils sat quietly, smiling and listening to him as he spoke.

The talk prompted Gitte Buch to decide to turn away from her wild style of painting and seek out something with more substance.

Nature imbued with spirit

Instead, it was this new religious insight that crept into the picture.

“Ever since I was a child on Samsø, I’ve had an animistic relationship with nature. A sense of being in touch with both plants and animals. And it is this form of religiosity or spirituality that I have continued to explore,” she adds, but explains that studying the icons also brought home to her the difference between the Western Church and the Eastern Church (the Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches).

In a nutshell, the Western Church focuses on the Passion – that is, Jesus on the cross – whilst the Eastern Church centres on the Resurrection and therefore features empty crosses.

Her relationship with Christianity has meant that, upon invitation, she has painted the new altarpiece for Tryggelev Church – a task she approached with great reverence – and a touch of uncertainty and self-doubt.

“My altarpiece features various elements from the Bible. For example, the Samaritan woman who meets Jesus at the well. He says: ‘Give me water, woman!’ Without condemning her, as was otherwise customary for Jews to regard Samaritans. She felt seen, so she gives him water from the jar and runs home to the village to tell of her experience.”

The jug is a recurring motif in Gitte Buch’s paintings: “Throughout the ages and across all cultures, women have dug up clay, shaped the jug and placed it in the fire, and once it was fired until hard and dense, they have carried all their most precious possessions in it – seed, milk, water”.

Other symbols in her paintings include the well, the empty grave, the bowl of mercy and the jar of ointment. “The jar, in particular, resonates with my naturalistic approach. The jar is a symbol of womanhood,” says Gitte Buch, explaining that her paintings are constantly becoming more and more ‘quiet’, as she calls it.

For her to be satisfied with a painting, it must serve the same function as an icon. Not a picture for her or others to look at, but a picture that also looks back at her.

An image of stillness

For Gitte Buch, painting stillness involves, for example, the white patches that, like snowflakes or cherry leaves, drift down across the surface of the painting: “Some call them angels, but to me they are not. It is the image of the Earth breathing…”

A new phase in her painting has begun in her studio at her home in Bøsseløkke. For whilst she has, for a long period, been painting a series she calls “On the Edge of the Country”, in which the view of fields and the sea – which she has enjoyed for nearly forty years – is captured in her abstractions, she has recently been working on paintings which she has titled ‘To the Earth’!

“Yes, or ‘Ad terram’, so you can see I know my Latin,” she laughs ironically, explaining that the essence is that it is the Earth that is crying out for help. Or rather: the Earth and nature will manage just fine. It is us, humans, who are on our way out of the history of evolution.

“But right now I’m practising working solely with the surface. I’m not quite sure how, but I’m enjoying it, and I feel I’m moving in that direction,” she says, emphasising that it is the divine in humanity and nature that interests her. Not debates and disagreements. These must be set aside in favour of the greater peace.