Terms that seem to have nothing to do with one another.
Mineralogy and crystallography — both sober natural sciences. And alongside them, art.
crystallography
“something seamlessly
connected”
“To arrive at art by way of mineralogy and mining, process engineering, pigments and crystallography was for me the obvious path!”
Mineralogy — an exact science, concerned, with few exceptions, with the inorganic, naturally formed components of the Earth’s crust. It seeks to understand the processes at work in nature in order to apply that knowledge to the synthesis of industrially relevant materials.
Crystallography — likewise an exact science, a branch of mineralogy, concerned with the structure, formation and production of crystals, their properties and their applications.
Art — a human cultural product, the result of a creative process. To find an ordering system for it is difficult. Compared with the natural sciences, art lacks the fundamental parameters that would allow universal and incontrovertible definitions.
“For art there is no binding, verifiable statement! Is that necessary? It is not necessary! Nor is it possible!”
the more varied
the results
The more degrees of freedom and variables a system has — here art, painting — the more varied the resulting products can become, and the more exciting what may still come.
Most mineralogists working in industry have no relationship to the object of their work. Minerals are merely a natural product, a raw material, nothing more. The sometimes wonderfully formed crystal groups, masterpieces of nature, are given no attention.
For others, though, that is a dream, a glimpse into another world. Researching the literature on painting, wherever expressionist pictures are described, one comes again and again upon words such as structure, crystalline, or crystals.
That can only be explained by the fact that artists have always taken their inspiration from nature — here too, from crystals and minerals. Impressions and imagination fused, and abstract compositions resulted.
You have to be interested, to have imagination, to be open to what is new, and to be able to give yourself over to the effect of a picture — then everyone will discover their own art.
Photographs from the collection.
Masterpieces of nature.
From my own collection
The question is not what you look at, but what you see.Henry David Thoreau