About Eduard Dill
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Born in Bern in 1943, Eduard Dill is a Swiss painter. He was attracted to the arts at an early age, and his daily activities including painting and singing in a choir. As an accordion and piano player, he was also interested in classical music.
From 1969 to 1972, he studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Bern. He then continued from 1972 to1974 at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe, Germany.
During his years of study, Eduard Dill was awarded by scholarships from the Erziehungsdirektion des Kanton Berns and the two-year Aeschlimann Stipendium Award.
He was greatly influenced by the Renaissance painters, especially Leonardo Da Vinci, and applied Renaissance techniques such EiTempera and the sfumato method, especially during his early works, in the so-called Interieurs and Kratzbildern. Dominant motifs included empty spaces, Beizen-szenen (Bar scenes), Nature, and landscapes.
A series of large-format oil paintings called the Huge Portraits, which depicted faces that he had drawn instantaneously, are to be found in the ‘wild’ phase of his career. This ended with the “Verläufe-phase”, characterized by subtle and imperceptible chromatic changes created through directly working oil colors with a large spatula over the canvas. The effects with light, the colors and the instant moment of these works are evocative of William Turner’s paintings. From the initial versions of the Verläufe originated the foundations of his contemporary works.
He has also done much in the area of coal drawings and crayon drawings. The latter consisted of using two hundred overlapping layers of different colors, resulting in interesting motifs being created by the texture of the paper; these were then emphasized by the first, lighter layers. The charcoal drawing works, of which each took only one to two seconds to draw, had already begun to be made near the end of the phase of instantaneously painted faces.
His paintings are always evolving: light and colors reflecting landscapes (outside and inside his soul) are sketching at each moment of creation. Living now in the Val-de-Travers, a region in the Canton of Neuchâtel in the middle of an extraordinarily beautiful valley, he is continuously amazed by the liveliness of the nature—the hills, the Areuse Springs, and the sudden changes of the weather that create a awe-inspiring sky with memorable sunsets and sunrises.
He also taught at the Volkshochschule in Bern and gave private lessons.
1987 Sunday Morning – a play written by E.Y. Meyer – conversations between Eduard Dill and E.Y.Meyer after a Vernissage – in Swiss Germann (traduction to German by Wolfgang Brehm was published in 1987)
