Jascha Gerhardt

Started painting my brother during a trip in the car. In the end I took a photo and finished the painting at home.

Paintings from my broken-screen smartphone. The first one is a self-portrait painted through a window at a kebab shop while waiting for my order in Hanover city centre. The second one is a portrait of a passenger on public transport.

Someof my recently digitizes sketches. They are from various places in Germany. Many of them from times when I hung out with some art friends.

This piece is a digital painting from the Stuttgart subway, done on my way home one late Friday evening.

Lately I have been inspired by the American Impressionists, especially the Boston School painters. Their way of painting is interesting because it is situated at the meeting point of realism and impressionism. The painters of the Boston School treated a painting first and foremost as a two-dimensional arrangement of color spots and not as a grouping of objects.

If executed masterfully, an abstract-looking sketch made up of a small number of colored spots can turn into a fully realistic rendition of the scene over time. The final painting retains a certain sense of poetry – a feeling that the spots the painting is made up of might disintegrate at any moment. I have tried to apply this way of thinking in this painting.

What is even more interesting is that this way of painting only started to be explored during the 17th century by painters like Velázquez and Vermeer, and fully developed during the 19th century.

If you want to learn more about this topic, I recommend you check out Paul Ingbretson's YouTube channel.

Digital painting that I painted live at the Natural History Museum in Stuttgart, Germany! Around 2 hours on location and 1 hour for detailing at home.

At the Night of 1000 Drawings Stuttgart the illustrator Mayha Suaysom and me did live drawings inside an "illu booth", which is like a photo booth but you have to wait for around 5 minutes and a drawing comes out! All the money we collected was given to charity.

Red & Violet Flowers, 2023. Digital piece from imagination.

Inspired by the beautiful floral still lives of 17th and 18th century Dutch painter Rachel Ruysch. Since photography was not available to her, Rachel, like other flower painters from the period, gathered an extensive collection of flowers and flower studies. The final artworks were guided by the flowers natural appearance but without a doubt executed from her imagination.

Oftentimes, a Carpe Diem / Memento Mori message is present, for you can see the flowers already fading away, struggling to stay alive for another day before rotting away. They are some of the pieces of art that inspire me the most and have inspired me in painting this piece, as well.

Urban Sketching at Aegidientorplatz in Hannover. The giant building in the middle is the headquarters of German Bank Nord/LB.

Drawing a friend of mine during a portrait drawing session that I organized. Done with a graphite stick in about 15 mins I think.

The whole sketchbook page from the recent posts. Drawn in museums in Stuttgart and Hannover, Germany.