The paintings I create arise in my mind and I do not always exactly how it turns out on the canvas.
It just happens. Of course, I have an idea, a thought, a memory, but how I then express it with colours is a more or less unconscious process. The picture becomes it’s meaning during the process of painting.
It is my meaning, because it is how I see the world from my subjective point of view.
I give my pictures titles that express something of what I have thought and felt while painting. I’m not sure if that’s a good idea, since I thus possibly predetermine also a certain interpretation.
Sometimes, people ask me what the image means and before I tell what it means to me, I try to figure out what the viewer sees, what emotions it evokes. And that’s mostly something quite different from the meaning I gave to the image.
For instance, in my image “Sad Memories” I have given sad memories of my life a colour. The person who bought the picture was smitten immediately with it, as for her, the painting radiates optimism and she went home with happy feelings.
Experiences have, depending on the frame of reference, a completely different meaning and are always the result of a personal, interpretive process.
Cognition is something subjective, something “Private” because we select from a set of infinitely possible meanings one, just enough for ourselves. Our private view of the world is one perspective besides of an infinite number of perspectives that are not perceived.
Of course, we permanently change the meanings in our world, because the world itself changes permanently.
So it may be, that when I look in a few weeks, months or years at my pictures, I give them a completely different meaning.