Arcanum QuestContinue Reading
(Drawn with ballpoint pens, pencils and white pen on A3 paper)
“The swamp is a secretive and sometimes monstrous place. It’s a treasury of things long hidden and forgotten – and the keys to unlock them are found within, if you dare to step a foot into the misty grounds.”
This artwork found its origin during a convention I attended in summer. What started as a doodle of a random creature took a clear direction very soon. Raigardo, the hydra, introduced itself and wanted to take shape on the paper and I found myself soon in a blissful flow of drawing with my beloved ballpoint pens on a big format again. However, Raigardo – a rather serious and marked being – needed a curious little fella (a crocodile-dragon hybrid, Okan) to pay him a visit in his foggy swamp, where he is on the hunt for the flying keys, sometimes competing with the restless little snakes.
Something that became very clear to me soon during my PhD studies in the field of plant metabolomics research is: What we know about nature is quite astonishing – why things work the way they do and how. And this knowledge that we have yet again raises questions about further details which we want to investigate for an even better understanding. These questions (in this case: as a result of scientific curiosity) drive us, we chase their answers, only to find out that these answers we sought lead to many more questions and show us how little we actually know (and understand) about the world around us. It is – and always will be – quite humbling and yet so incredibly fascinating. And I guess this concept applies to many things in life, and yet, (in my opinion) we should never stop to strive for answers.