Theda Gutenberg has applied her creativity to drawing and painting since she was a young child. She received her first in-depth art experience at St. Leonard´s College in Melbourne/Australia in 1992. She has thus known for a very long time that art was her vocation.

While attending the University of Media and Arts in Hannover, she studied design and took part-time art classes, receiving her Design Diploma in 2001. At this point she was more a designer than an artist, accommodating the norms of social expectations. Afterwards she received two DAAD scholarships and continued her education in Somerset´s College of Fine Arts in Taunton, England, and the University of Design in Hangzhou/China. She expected to become a fashion as well as costume designer, but after a few initial years she experienced so much physical pain that she was forced to seek a different path.

That was the moment when she began immersing herself in inner, reflective work, which took her step by step closer to what her heart wanted. She also gained more and more liberty. She remembered how hard it had been not to name what she was doing. She did not know herself: only her heart did. These steps created something new, where no naming or labelling was needed. Wow, how thankful she became while experiencing life anew. During all these processes she drew and painted what her soul articulated. She found out as a woman artist that she was going through a repetitive birth—death process, like you find in nature, becoming and waning. This cycle has helped her to let go and to receive anew.

She says it also has to do with her strong experience as a child seeing her mother’s “count down” after being diagnosed with breast cancer, losing her two breasts and then dying on Theda’s first day of school.

Thirty years later Theda Gutenberg worked at a Jewish cemetery, transforming her mother’s death into her own living reality. Symbolically, she went down into a grave in order then to climb out of it, and at this moment she decided for life and living.

Meanwhile she has created work that helped her believe in giving birth to every new day. In this chapter of her life she started this project of the pyramid. Everyday ´s pouring clay in the circle´s casting mold builded up her trust and happiness for her own life.

She also moved around, living part time in Madrid, Barcelona and Berlin, in order to experience more of life than remain merely a trained brain. During all this time she developed her way of drawing and painting. Additionally, she created for a while an artistic name — Amy Waismehl — as you can see on some drawings. This name let her step back from herself and take a litte rest.

Nowadays, after all those dramatic dark drawings, Theda Gutenberg demonstrates in her paintings an enjoyment of life. It no longer seems en vogue to suffer. One should rather be your own perfume of life. Wow, to get at this point she has had to peal many skins. She has also given birth to three wonderful female children and enjoys living with them.

Theda Gutenberg paints on large canvases — from 150 cm to 300 cm — and with high level of feelings, dipping brushes and hands in oil color, and applying then on linen fabric. While painting, she senses a type of eternal knowledge, gnosis, acquiring wisdom each time she studies her paintings. It is amazing how much paintings have to tell when being looked at.