"Baumseelen" -- "Tree Souls" by Oliver Hertel

Smiling faces in a café...

A wooden lady

Today, I would like you to meet an artist who is a friend of mine and a very much cherished inspiration. His work is dedicated to "Tree Souls", sculptures of wood from trees which were broken by a storm. He has been a painter for most of his life, and when I first heard from him, he played his saxophone in the early morning hours at 3 or 4 in a park next to my and my parents' home -- way back in the Seventies. I listened to this concert with enchantment, until the police came and sent him away.

They're giggling!

Later I met him and we found out that it was him who played the saxophone at night and that he is just 2 days older than I . And he is always ahead of me as an artist; he does things that thrill me. My husband and I met another old friend of mine, we had coffee in the courtyard of Bergedorf castle, and then Oliver happened to turn up and we had a reunion after 20 years.
Here is a galery of smiling faces, roughly hewn out of the logs he split with an axe from a windfallen tree.

"Gift to the Earth" is the title
of this sculpture

This sculpture will be given back to Mother Earth tomorrow afternoon, which means that the artist will bury it in the ground in a little ceremony. You may think it is a waste, but Oliver's philosophy is not to cling to a single object, but to have confidence in the process of creation and to share it with our planet.

Another bright smile

Bergedorf Castle

 The exhibition takes place in Bergedorf castle in the courtyard around which this castle was built. It will end tomorrow evening. Bergedorf is a part of Hamburg which was an independent town until 1937.

Update: I wonder if the "Gift to the Earth" ceremony did take place, because we had a pouring rain all over the place during the date. The sky seems to have objections.