oliver maichle

” I asked Katja, my bar manager. “No idea, he never says a word, always drinks Fritz-Kola and just draws”, she replied. I watched the fellow in the striped Adidas jacket and baseball cap, hunched over the bar, lost in thought, a sharp pencil twitching over a sheet of paper.

The light in the bar was pretty dim, too dark to make anything out properly. Guests strained their eyes reading the drinks menu and held the table candle closer to help. And there sat this guy, drawing.

Impossible, I thought, he can’t see a thing. Must be some kind of crackpot. After a while I went over to him; I wanted to know.

” I asked him. “I’m not scribbling, I’m drawing”, he replied firmly, without looking up. Oh, he’s drawing, I thought.

Full of himself, too. “Let’s have a look”, I said. Slowly he turned his head towards me, looked me deep in the eyes and then, without a word, turned the A4 sheet round to face me.

In the darkness I could only make out the outline of a young woman’s face. I pulled the candle across the bar and held its light to the picture. It was incredible.

Drawn with the finest lines and shading, I was looking at a photorealistic likeness of a beautiful woman. “That’s Coco Chanel”, said the guy in the baseball cap, “I’m going to paint her big soon”. ” Without a word he pulled his iPhone out of his Adidas jacket and showed me his pictures in miniature.

“Lovely pictures”, I said after a while, and I really meant it, “I’d love to see the originals sometime”. “If you like, I could do an exhibition here in your bar, then you’d see the pictures at their proper size”, came the reply from under the baseball cap, and I thought I could make out a little smile.

“Sure, you can do an exhibition here, but first you’ve got to paint the pillars”. ” he asked me. “The five pillars at the back in the lounge”, I explained, tugged at the sleeve of his Adidas jacket and showed him the pillars.

” he asked. ” “Whatever you like”. “OK, deal.

I’ll start tomorrow evening, and in October I’ll have my exhibition here”, he said, grinning broadly at me. And sure enough: the next evening he turned up with a single brush and one tube of black paint, right on the dot at 8 pm as die kunstbar was opening, and started painting the first pillar. No template, no stencil, no ruler or any other aid.

Just uss dr Lameng, as we like to say in Cologne. Freehand, straight off the cuff. ” I asked him.

“Yes, a Fritz-Kola”, he said, and carried on painting. A few pillars later, I finally learnt his name.

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Photos by KaPe Schmidt

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