Burdens to Bear

Franz Baumgartner, 38, isn't impressed by the argument that female painters aren't taken as seriously as male painters.

"Who is taken seriously?," he asks gloomily, sitting on a couch which holds a crumpled black leather jacket and jeans. "Maybe five or six painters in Germany. Art itself is not taken seriously. People go to galleries, but they're only impressed by 'stars.'

"Everyone promises you money, but still you have to struggle to get it. The gallaries wait to get paid, and then we have to wait, too. But that's a field I don't understand too much."

Baumgartner, whose large landscape paintings sell for12,000 DM apiece, has lived off his work for the last two or three years. Before then, he glued billboards. He likes living in Atlierstandort Nippes, but doesn't view it as a sanctuary from "ordinary" German life.

"The atmosphere is OK. There's not too many places in Cologne where it's so green. It's brilliant. But I don't like all the artists. A painter here seems to follow my work in two-month intervals. There are some creeps. It's easy to copy work, not easy to develop it.

"Everybody has his burden to bear. It might be the neighbor who plays loud music; the dog who drops his shit in front of your front door, it's the same. It's ridiculous."

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