Der Bettler

Hand signed and numbered with pencil. Edition: 72/100 From his birth in 1964 Franz Graw is a resident of Düsseldorf, a city in Western Germany on the Rhine river. He as well is the first German, a virtual guest of THE SECRETS OF PERFECTION. Thus I have to be considerate towards him. Franz Graw did not study at art school or academy, but he mastered to paint all by himself. We have to agree that the artist reached his purpose and became a fine painter. His talent opens out in a lot of his pictures telling about wonderful, strange, and cranky world full of various entities and role players. He is a man of humor and imagination. To put viewers into a good mood is his first intention. The artist gives possibility for viewer to interpret his images freely at will. That is why his pictures have no offensive character, they provoke to guess what had the author in his mind. Franz Graw does not appreciate art that is not figurative enough. He continues the trends of such German artists like Georg Flegel, Adolf Eberle, Fritz Freund, Albrecht Dürer, Carl Herpfer, Jorg Breu the Elder, Hans Brunner, Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Käthe Kollwitz, and some others. Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin are his favorites from not Germans. From compositional viewpoint we can state that Franz Graw organizes details into entity using scheme of the circle and letting to viewer eye to move around. As we could notice some compositional schemes are more liked by artists of particular nationality, others are less liked or even disliked. As I showed in my paper Pictorial Composition Schemes the circle scheme together with the cross, trident, spiral, figure of eight were appreciated by German artists highly. It confirms again that Franz Graw is from ranks of painters of Germany and Düsseldorf, a city in Western Germany on the Rhine river.