Education
Ulrike Arnold is a German painter from Düsseldorf who uses stones, dirt and earth from locations around the world to create abstract paintings. © Gabriel Granillo
Documentary highlights life and painting of Ulrike Arnold
By Svea Conrad
“Meteorite dust,” she said. “I love the canvas like this; it is like the skin of the earth.”
Arnold’s 10 acres or so of surrounding land are one of many “magical places” that double as her studio. Beneath a small roofed enclosure sit bowls and tables, filled with her painting materials, all of which she digs, scrapes or shaves from the earth: shale, cinders, limestone, salt.
The German artist, whose life and work are the focal point of new documentary “Dialogue Earth,” spends several months out of the year traveling to some of the most remote places in the world, whereupon she spreads her canvas, settles into the landscape, forages for her materials and begins to paint—sometimes for three weeks at a time, camping on site if she can; and she’s done so for about 40 years now. Though she calls the post-industrial city of Düsseldorf home, Arnold returns to the area around Flagstaff, Arizona regularly, both to live and create. She chooses the places where she paints with intuition but also intent.
Ulrike Arnold’s painting materials sit on a table at her property east of Flagstaff, Arizona. © Gabriel Granillo
“I want to capture the essence of a place”
“I go with my feeling to a place, somewhere that is untouched or not destroyed, a feeling where there is no mining and disturbance, to show and catch this beauty — that is my goal,” she said. Arnold paints almost exclusively on site using the materials that directly surround her. In Bisbee, Arizona that’s copper, malachite and azurite; in Flagstaff, pink sandstone and red volcanic ash, among others. Only the sources that exist naturally come into consideration.
“I want to capture the essence of a place,” she said. Arnold referred to her practice as “going back to our roots,” that is, referencing ancient forms of expression like the cave paintings in Lascaux, France, which brought her to tears as a 21-year-old and spurred her desire to go back to school (at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf) and study art. While the (art) world is bending, buckling and swarming with technology, Arnold references the increasingly distant past — millennia away from now — using materials that have taken thousands of years just to become. The only chemical in the process is the clear acrylic fixative she uses as a binding agent for the paints.
“Dialogue Earth” chronicles Arnold’s life and practice
All this and more comes to the fore in “Dialogue Earth,” in which director Hank Levine (“Abandonados,” “City of God”) chronicles Arnold’s life and practice in the context of the present climate, both environmental and political. The film is a series of mesmerizing shots: Arnold on the U.S.-Mexico border or the wilderness of southern Utah. It also touches on her upbringing under her priest father’s strict word, while exploring her act of constantly seeking that which is spiritual; it unpacks the cosmos and geologic formations, all the while taking us to so many of the places that have become Arnold’s muses — rarely human, always earthen.
Central to the film are also Flagstaff and its characters: The late Helen Running, Arnold’s “sweetest friend” since she picked Arnold up from Flagstaff’s Pulliam Airport in 1989, geologists and meteor specialists each get their time in the limelight. “Dialogue Earth” highlights the people Arnold meets through her artistic ventures, a motley crew strewn across the film and connected by the bubbling and impassioned Arnold whose eyes, if they aren’t darting to the vast skies, are fixed on the ground, always searching for more material, more paint.
“I often go barefoot to feel the earth,” she said, jumping up eagerly to demonstrate — her outfit itself a canvas, white and peppered with the dust and dirt she’d used recently. “We walk over it, we touch the earth, but often don’t really see how beautiful it is, how many colors you walk over without being aware.” She often prompts audiences at Broken Arrow Cave in Utah to do so with her. The hollowed out stone cliff, located on Amangiri Resort property in Page, Arizona, is a place she visits often. The exclusive hotel also owns several of her paintings.
Arnold similarly welcomes people touching her paintings if they ask. Dennis Hopper appears in the documentary, running his hand over a piece he’s purchased while explaining to us Arnold’s process. Perhaps one of the most captivating moments in the film, however, comes as children from a school for the blind in Santiago de Chile brush their palms across her paintings. Some smell them. Others lick the salty and sulfurous surface, gathered from the nearby Atacama Desert.
Artist Ulrike Arnold chooses from a plethora of natural materials to use as her paint. Arnold is the focus of a documentary called "Dialogue Earth," which takes place in Flagstaff and around the world. © Victor Van Keuren
Paint with the cosmos
Arnold is all body, many words are substituted by a gesture or a sound, a puff or a whistle to signify verve or excitement, a loud whoosh when she shows how she moved the paintbrush across a particular piece. Scenes in the film show her laying down on the sand where she’s working. The pitter patter of rain that fell on a painting is a phenomena she illustrates by tapping loudly on the table. The rain, like the wind and the rats nibbling at the edge of a painting, Arnold said, are the art, weather and wildlife “collaborating”. “I always say it’s a dialogue with the earth; in the moment I am painting I am using the earth, I put the color here and it’s a dialogue with me and the paint and the animals and weather.”
Arnold had long wanted to paint with the cosmos, too, which she began doing in 2003 by way of a chance meeting with Marvin Killgore. Killgore, “the cowboy” as Arnold called him, travels the world collecting meteorites, slicing them and saving the shavings. He too is featured prominently in the film. Arnold compared the moment she met Killgore to a Brother’s Grimm fairy tale. In the story a poor girl walks into the forest, stars fall into her lap and there become gold coins.
“In that moment I felt I was in ‘Sterntaler,’ it’s such a beautiful children’s story. It’s also a symbol for luck, the luck was coming, falling over me. And then I started to make tests here in Flagstaff with the first meteorite paintings. The meteorite, for me is a sign of the cosmos,” Arnold said.
Ulrike Arnold runs her hand over a painting she’s made with cinders and meteorite dust on her land outside of Flagstaff, Arizona. Arnold is the subject of the new documentary, “Dialogue Earth”. © Gabriel Granillo
“Our earth is vulnerable”
At this point Levin directs the documentary to questions of the spiritual, whether in the form of God, as Ulrike’s father evokes in his sermons, or science as Lowell Observatory astronomers talk about life in space, or something tied to the universe, magic, spiritual, inexplicable.
Here the documentary introduces the political too, something Arnold said is not necessarily an ingredient to her paintings. Nonetheless, Levin gently guides us in that direction, with scenes at the border and discussions of climate change and Donald Trump, which in 2019, are inseparable from discussions of the earth.
“In the film it comes out that our earth is vulnerable, so you could say I am an activist. No I am not really, but through what I do comes awareness, that we have to protect this earth. Everybody has to give their part, so I am doing it in my way. Maybe with a sort of bringing of attention,” Arnold said.
Find out more about Ulrike Arnold at www.ulrikearnold.com
