It is love that makes art, they say. The ambassador of love itself is art, but I wonder: what about hatred?

Isn’t hatred an equally strong motivation? Not the personally motivated hatred that may arise in personal relationships, but the social hatred?

I first met it in fairy tales, until during my puberty there were student revolts, the onset of youth and the revolution of students. I saw the hatred in the eyes of good citizens. “This would not have happened with Adolf”, the people expressed anger at the pure sight of war opponents, hippies, long-haired men, and then demanded collective punishment. German bourgeois could not calm down with mockery and malice at the so-called ” Gammler.”

A few years later I met the hatred again. This time it was against women’s libbers. Women on the way to equal rights were the petty bourgeois’ greatest fear. Insults, aggressions, contempt came disguised as cheap jokes from the yelling regulars’ tables to the televisions and newspapers in order to separate these hysterical man-women from sensible society. Even when the word “feminist” was pronounced, faces were distorted in disgust and reluctance, often in men in mockingly imposing behaviour at the lowest level of communication. It was always below the belt, women in search of heterosexual happiness did well to document their femininity clearly distanced from the sisters in combat.

And now that the environment and the peace movement seem to have reunited a reasonable proportion of the population, I see myself in hatred again. This time these are vegans who cause hatred. People who don’t even do something as bad as growing hair long, protest or even give up men. They just try to avoid a little bit of animal suffering, nothing more. But the carnivores howl as if their sausage had been nibbled off or somebody puked on their schnitzel. No comedy without making jokes about meat consumption, presenting vegans as stupid morons and making jokes at their expense. The hatred just comes along, the faces of contempt and know-all disgust distorted again. And I paint my paintings once again in an environment of hatred.

And somehow it disgusts me, I juggle my skills into the ring and smile cheekily. I hate back.