»White Canvas« by Martin Donath

The First Stroke

The hardest part of making art is to begin - to ruin the perfectly white canvas and raze its purity. As my approach for making art or music is always of a more architectural kind, this is the case for me.

How often have I sat in front of my laptop, lacking the right mood and enough creative potential to reach the threshold at which things are starting to live and work on their own. I cannot just sit down and outline a track in 30 minutes, perfectionism pays its tribute. Though nothing can ever be perfect, because newly created things always induce further things to emerge from them, the pure striving is one of the main reasons wherefore I am into music.

Besides the technical aspects, there is of course the narrative, which the artist should constantly have in mind. When he begins his work with a fresh idea that came onto him quite recently, the work is completely finished in his head - but the canvas is still empty (or there is only silence, when speaking of music).

So technical knownledge is essential for an approximation of the artist’s picture. As this image is some kind of blurry, because it is always at least partly determined by emotions, this image will have to be reduced in some points. We can never pin it down entirely. How do you describe something analytically that you don’t even see or realize in total?

So where do you want to make your first stroke?