Art and me, we have a strange and very complicated relationship. I have been chasing it with determination and desperation, and it has cold-heartedly denied me. The pain of rejected love is cruel, but I submitted to it only so long. I retreated, admitting defeat was the most dignified thing to do in this situation, I thought, and I became a lawyer. But then, surprise, instead of going its own way, art took up a habit of following me instead, never quite disappearing out of sight, yes, I would say, teasing me, challenging me.

Eventually, we made up, kind of, since then I have been treating it with respectful nonchalance,and it has been faithfully and annoyingly waiting for me ever since at the breakfast table, casually asking me: “So, what are you up to today?”, not being offended by my silence while I am hiding behind my crucially important notes for the day, while I am all business, anticipating legal arguments and dictating the first legal brief in my mind, instead asking again, equally casually: “Mind, if I tag along?”, and I – with an air of studied indifference respond: “Sure, why not?”, and out the door we rush.

And when I come home in the evening and I open my very important briefcase out tumble bits of this and that, drawings on note paper, done while I was on the phone, creatures with big eyes while I was thinking about security of data transmission, one of my new wooden drawings “Watch out while you are being watched” over a quick coffee break. At home I don’t know how to archive the mass of these  bits and pieces anymore, nor where to store the heap of casual paintings done at night, JUST because, and during every free moment and I feel like I imagine the husband must be feeling who doesn’t quite know whether he is cheating on his wife when he spends time with a female friend his wife is well aware of or whether he is cheating on said female friend when spending quality time with his wife.

Garbriel Lorca, the beautiful Spanish poet who was murdered by the Nationalist Forces shortly after the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 – who really was a much better poet than an artist expressed it very much the same way, because he loved drawing, tenderly calling it his “mistress” while he stayed married, of course he did, to his writing. I remember reading in a small, illustrated Lorca volume I had bought at the Heinrich Heine Buchhandlung at the main train station of the Berlin Zoo station – a book store that was as great and complicated and deep and full of books and ideas about books as it could possibly get, probably a dependance of Borges library. I was twenty and attending classes by Prof. Robert Kudielka at the HdK, the University of Fine Arts in then still Westberlin – while actually meaning to study law at the Free University. You see, from the beginning this was a complicated thing and the small Lorca volume seem to me like an announcement of something I was not ready to grasp yet. I still own it.

I got constantly side-tracked during those years because of places like the Heinrich-Heine book store where they absolutely supported the idea of spending your entire cash worth a month of earnings at  some student’s job on a heap of books you could just so carry to the register – after first staying for what seemed like days in the sacred railway catacombs, resembling a labyrinth of overpacked shelves. You’d come out with marvelous finds, books that had been hiding for decades, books unknown even to the book seller, and you and the book seller would jointly rejoice in the find, and the book seller would come up with a fantasy price for the book because the one displayed on the inside of the cover seemed – unreal. 51 cents, Pfennige, or something like this. So, you’d pay 2,50 DM, and it wasn’t a used book, it was a book that had been waiting for you to be the first owner patiently since about 1953, well over a decade before you had been born and even more time before you became literate and then some more.

I got constantly side-tracked because there were the collections of old masters in Dahlem, one S-Bahn station before Thielplatz, my law school station, and you’d only guess that I must be a somewhat decent lawyer for passing my exams besides the fact that getting off the train in Dahlem to for a small detour through the beautiful tree-lines streets of Dahlem as often as not ended up with an entire day in the collections, studying Rembrandt and Baehr and flemish artists instead or, if I made it to class in the morning, not returning from the university’s cafeteria at lunch time because it was located pretty much right next to the collections.

I am actually now practicing law, specializing, surprise, on art and law, and art still has a very sly way of side-tracking me. Maybe it has something to do with the fourteen years I spent in New York, idling away time at the MoMA and the Met, and at Crawford Doyle booksellers. Art has always influenced the Why and Where, has seduced me to accept situations I would not have dreamed of for the sake of studying a Vermeer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Calder’s Circus at the Whitney, or rough Miro drawings at MoMA or Gerhard Richter‘s black and white paintings at MoMA, Odilon Redon, Armando Reverón, Richard Serra, Lucian Freud, Swoon, Kiki Smith, Marina Abramović, Nancy Spero, my appetite may have been more voracious than discerning, but it found nourishment as I found distraction from more pressing questions and challenges and time passed swiftly as I was holding still, holding still and just looking and looking.At times that seems my main occupation. Looking. Thinking. Understanding. Reversing. Looking again.

Sometimes now I suspect that I do what I do – including law – because of art not despite, but I am loath to follow up on that suspicion. For now, I like the casual question in the morning, the uncertainty, the “Wow, this is still going on” and with as much determination and desperation as ever before. One could not ask for better. Want me to tag along. Sure.

By the way, above drawing is one done on the side, complementing a serious legal interest of mine. Even as I write this blog. Who is watching you? I am still married to the law. But if you made you way through to here, you realize that I as I have spoken about “art” as a single occupation I have really referred to two loves: Writing and painting. Now, that is – almost – too much for one life. definitely for one blog article that is already stretching the limits of a reasonable article’s length.  It’s a bit crowded at the breakfast table at times.