Otto Laske

Favorite Medium: Digital Painting and digital graphics

Can you tell us about your background and how you first became interested in art?

I first became engaged with “art” (a broad term!) as a poet when I was 17 (then writing in German), and have written English poetry in since age 30, which, together with early piano practice, led me to becoming a composer of concert music, both vocal & instrumental and electronic, at age 27, and doing so over 45 years. It is through music composition that I learned to work with software. When I turned 75, I created animations which synthesized my poetry and music with photographic images, which in turn led me to digital painting and graphics.My compositional experience is based on work with music software (since 1970). Given my broad experience in music (dating from age 10), I consider my visual art as visual music, meaning that it articulates flow, transformation, modulation, dissolution, and is about texture as much as about color, shape, and form, as does a work of music. I would say I have developed a‘digital esthetics’ which equally reflects my approach to composition in music and the visual arts and explains why I don’t accept curatorial criteria that disregard the (in my view) total permeability of the boundaries between art media.

Please walk us through your creative process from idea conception to completion of a piece.

Except in poetry, where my compositional approach is characterized by deep concentration and listening (as well as a life so structured that it keeps itself “still”), my creative process in music and the visual arts has always been technology-based, in the sense that what inspires me is what my toolkit allows me to do and hinders me from doing repeatedly. That says that I am an ‘experimental artist’ who loses interest in composition when beginning to repeat myself, except if new software tools can shake up my acquired habits. I do not like to overstay my welcome in any art I engage with since art making for me is self-expression, and so I am the one who chooses in what medium to express myself at any point in time.

Where do you find inspiration? And what motivates you to create?

Since I rely on software tools informing a digital esthetics that shows me the way, I am deeply unintentional when I create, knowing that the outcome of my work is unpredictable and that I will need my critical faculties to throw out experiments that do not surprise (or even shatter) me.

How do you know when a piece is finished?

In experimental work, a piece is never finished since it can serve as a template for new work that is unrecognizably connected to the work it derives from, and intentionally so. It often takes me years to arrive at a definitive judgment of a piece which may result in my discarding it by taking it off whatever website it used to live on (shaking my head about why I didn’t withdraw it earlier).

How has the Experimental Group influenced your work?

The Experimental Group has been a welcome group of friends who share my conviction that art is about discovery and that one cannot judge a work based on the tools that made it possible to create it (which means that a painting is a painting whatever tools, digital or conventional, were used to create it.)

Does your work have a message and is this important to you?

I am not a messenger. I rely on my listeners’ or viewers’ own esthetic resources to generate their own message when receptive toward a work of art. I therefore consider my own view of a work of mine as only one among many possible views (and probably a limited one).

Which artists do you enjoy, and how have you been influenced by them?

My lifelong influencer has been Paul Klee whose Bauhaus book on Visual Thinking I have carried around with me since age 17 when I acquired it. Klee spoke of art making as having todo with ‘turning construction into expression’, a notion that has held up for me even in the digital domain where construction is based on the feedback loop between my living consciousness, onone hand, and the esthetic – musical or visual – knowledge embodied in software tools, on theother. It is this feedback loop and the ‘internal dialogue’ it provokes that is for me the core of the creative process in whatever medium I engage with, especially since this dialogue is one withthe unconscious, thus the mythical. Klee’s notion even holds up for me in poetry given that apoem is a ‘word machine’ that either works or fails to work.

Looking back on your artistic journey, what advice would you give to aspiring artists?

I do not have any advice to give. I would only say that in my experience, what matters in art making is one’s own aliveness, not any specific tools. And this ‘aliveness’ is for me a spiritual matter. It is an openness of mind and the senses that intensifies through the experience of loss and grief and thus is inseparable from sorrow, whether about the state of the world or one’s own failings.

What is your favorite thing to do when you are not in the studio making art?

I am also a psychologist and teacher of complex thinking called ‘dialectical’, as well as a gardener, walker, reader, traveler, and cook.

Feel free to add any insight which may not have been covered by the questions.

First of all, my thanks for this opportunity to connect with the EG, especially since I do not attend Zoom meetings. I am now too occupied by working to safeguard the large legacy of my wife Nadine Boughton, a wide-scoped visual artist, poet, and writer about whom I am preparing a documentary together with a Croatian film maker. I also want to thank Nella Lush for her passionate support of experimental art making that has significantly changed Cape Ann culture.

Lastly, a comment about what I mean by the ‘permeability’ of boundaries of art media: in the digital world we now live in, curatorial boundaries between art disciplines (such as ‘photography’ and ‘painting’) no longer make any sense, although an artist remains free to choose what medium to work in. Such boundaries now mainly serve political purposes and support ‘cliques’ rather than open groups in which people inspire each other by working in different media.

Thinking Landscape in progress 6x5

www.saatchiart.com/olaske

www.ottolaske.com

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