My practice moves between abstraction and figuration, but both emerge from the same impulse: to play with unpredictable marks. I begin with larger abstract paintings built through fast, spontaneous gestures made by scraping paint with various tools. For me the lines and fields of colour behave like historical fragments, overlapping, disappearing, resurfacing with meaning emerging from their persistence, loss, and reappearance. The paintings are process‑driven, grounded in the act of advancing into the unknown, and shaped by my background in history, where cultural narratives are similarly constructed from fragments. Alongside these works, I create small figurative paintings on wooden palettes. These begin as functional mixing surfaces for the larger abstract works. Over time, blotches and marks accumulate. I later adapt these marks into scenes or characters, allowing pareidolia and Gestalt perception, our innate tendency to find coherence in fragments, to intuitively guide the transformation. These pieces are often lighter in tone, sometimes satirical, and titled in German as a nod to Expressionism and to the act of translation: from mark to image, from impulse to narrative, from feeling to image. The two bodies of work are separate but there is a level of interdependence. The abstract paintings generate the conditions from which the figurative ones fall; the figurative works return a sense of story, humour, and human presence to the abstraction. Together they form a single ecosystem of thought, exploring how meaning is made, how it slips, and how it resurfaces in unexpected forms.