Once upon a time...
I lived at the edge of the forest in Gockhausen, "on the mountain" of Dübendorf.
Dübendorf, grown together with Zurich, decided now one day with the artists in the place, ... to order an oil picture which expresses in some way the special of such a city.
The friendly invitation also went out to me. I accepted it with thanks. That was in the spring of 1976.
But now it turned out that I neither knew how to paint an oil painting, nor ... what to paint on an oil painting ... Somewhat stunned I began to draw ... wrote signs which subsequently led to the first six for Dübendorf, later to further "picture sheets".
Since then, in all these years, in Paris, in Zurich, in New York, whenever I wanted to make myself a picture, I got
a reconsideration
a perception
a media report
a conversation
an experience
in this way their expression.
With opaque ink, I put the characters on a transparent film and had Rudolf Keller, Zurich, make 10 prints each on 140g paper. This minimum print run and the "A2", the largest normal format possible for plan printing, were thus in the lower price category. Since I was always interested in a "pictogram", this black-and-white process was ideally suited.
I numbered the "picture sheets" one after the other from 1-60 unconcerned whether the sequence or the sheet were "stage-ready" or not. She created an alphabet with signs that she could use to visualize her own poems and stories.
"I wasn't concerned with writing it down either, but with recording it ....
In any case, however, about keeping it in the eye ..."
Warja Lavater, Zurich, December 1996
