"I am Christoph Kern. I am an artist, a painter. This is what I studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. But besides that, my second passion is dealing with all what is commonly called the Cognitive Sciences. I soon became convinced that the skills needed for doing paintings symbolize a wide range of  the human mind?s abilities. And, transforming perceptions or products of the imagination into twodimensional symbols  is one of the oldest basic requirements of human beings. Knowing this, I thought painting could be more than only decoration. So I began looking for an artistic approach beyond depiction and I tried to combine the intuitive skills  necessary for painting with an analytic or at least systematic working method.   To give better access to the structure building processes underlying the art of painting.

I proceeded to develop a kind of image system that I called The Visual Kit. Its main feature consists of two aspects: The first one is that I am still engaged in the creation of paintings. I am using the tools of painting and keeping the rules of autonomy of painting.  This means I am working on real canvas with actual colors and and brushes and I am trying to do paintings that can stand in its own right without further explanations.The conception is to let the painting begin spontaneously. Then the painting progresses through stages of intermediate complexity to its most complex and perfect form that is possible at the moment.  The other aspect is my goal to make these structure building processes more transparent. I began to slow down the creative process. I achieve this deceleration when I stop at certain crucial moments and take a photograph of the formation and thus document it. To this I add any pertinent information about the creative process. Thus, I manage to "freeze" certain individual states (or stages) of the painting as if in slow motion or suspended animation. This process serves to help me in the development and evaluation of my own work and to aid in the general understanding of the creative processes at work in many artistic approaches to paintings. These images, in a way, represent the web of my memories. 

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