Eroica Apple: Frauenschuh's Symphony Studies (2/3)

Studies on the 3rd Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven

I am painting again today with oil on plywood while listening once more to the 3rd Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven; the music is the inner compass of my artistic activity today.

A kind of landscape emerges. In it, an oversized apple rises: monumental, almost surreal – and at the same time similar to a futuristic dwelling. Its surface is softly modeled, like the skin of a fruit. This apple is not just an object, but a living space.

I reflect on the context of the creation of the third symphony and ask myself: What does self-responsibility mean to me? And what did human self-responsibility mean to Beethoven? He decisively opposed the rigid class system of his time, saw himself as an individual, and unwaveringly upheld human dignity. This attitude pulses for me in the 'Eroica'. The music claims freedom – it demands, it is bold.

My Apple now becomes a symbol forindividuality and insight, as the artistic counterpart of that very self-responsibility. This apple symbolizes nothing forbidden, no lost paradise. Here it is living space, a place of individual decisions, a space for thought. The people who could live in it bear responsibility for their world.

While I fill the background of the landscape with cool, almost melancholic blues and grays, I think about home. Is this world, as it is today, home for me? The landscape I am painting is not idyllic in the classical sense. It is a space of search where I try to trace Beethoven's relation to the world and his struggle for community and freedom. Beethoven understood his music as a contribution to humanity, as a dialogue between the individual and the world. As a child of his time, he sought connection to the outside throughhis artistic activity. Is my art about something similar?

Possibly this is my today Apple of insight: the insight that home is not tied to a place, but arises from actively engaging with the world.