Peter Faust and Harun Aschrafi – what a superb team of artists!
There has been so much written about both these extraordinary artists that to try and define their original painting expertise would be a futile undertaking! The best would be to read for yourself the words written in the foreword by Peter Faust himself in this, his first book, from edition ars porcellana.
“Within the art of porcelain painting lays a lot of innovative potential! We have covered many aspects of this art through demonstrations and procedures, but there are many more ways for the painter to be positively motivated to try out other motifs and techniques. Travelling provides endless sources of inspiration to stimulate the imagination into producing new works of art.
In the vast scope of the porcelain painter’s work, there is still the possibility to develop his or her artistic skills using modern motifs as well as the traditional painting techniques accordingly. All the more exciting is when two painters from different cultural backgrounds work together on a piece. Our pictures, in their artistic entirety, show how; sometimes, one cannot distinguish which artist has painted what! This is because we often take into consideration the new and innovative interpretation of a motif and its combination of colours and background decoration. We also discuss how intense the layer of coloured paint ought to be to give the best results regarding a visual impact. As well as personal taste and preference of colours, the cultural customs play an important role when creating a piece of painted porcelain – making it extremely exciting!
We are often asked how we first start to design an object. Basically we get together and then, quite independently from one another, start to paint something “straight out of the blue”! It is a fact that we both have very different visions of what is beautiful and it sometimes happens that one of us starts painting and runs out of inspiration and the other picks up where the first one left off. When there is enough time and the painting “bug” really sets in, one will finish the piece until it is time to fire it. Then comes the point when it is nowhere near ready and the other artist will fill in his own ideas finally bringing everything together and – bingo – everything falls into place! It could also happen that another piece is created, independently from the first, and a second variation of the same theme is born (illustrations on pages 62,63).