Travel photos from Switzerland/Ticino, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Uzbekistan, and from the trip to China expand on the theme of travel photos
“A sea voyage lasting several months marked another turning point in the development of his work. It took the artist and his wife across the Mediterranean and the seas of Asia all the way to East Asia. He returned with numerous studies and paintings that he had created on board. The constant focus on the merchant ship (“Leipzig”) as it steered from port to port—in a sense, a drifting open-air studio—and the inevitable limitation to the view from the deck and the railing: such “restriction” could also be turned into a productive force.
“For weeks and months at sea, the artist absorbed above all the overwhelming experience offered by the sea in its ever-changing daily vistas: under a heat-shimmering sky, waves rolling in a sun-glazed, wash-blue hue in the China Sea; storm-whipped, towering green wave crests, crowned by seething white crests of foam; rainbows in the spraying spray amid wind force 10 in the Indian Ocean; the cool, iridescent fluorescence of sky and water in the Atlantic.(Gerhard Pommeranz-Liedtke)
The once painstakingly precise brushwork and the effort toward meticulously condensed painting could no longer be applied here; pen and brush are used loosely and, at times, in a calligraphic manner. The paintings now reflect the experience of space—which has become the central theme—in its ever-changing situations, as well as the study of the almost always moving water’s surface.
A painting trip organized by the Artists’ Association, which took him and several other artists via Moscow to Central Asia, led to the ancient cities of the Orient. In Bukhara and Samarkand, in addition to drawings, he also produced several oil studies on painting paper, in which he attempted to capture the distinctive color palette of these cities and their natural surroundings.” (Mayer, Rudolf. 1983. Welt der Kunst Otto Niemeyer-Holstein. Berlin: Henschelverlag. pp. 32 and 42)