Reinhard Behrens

      
Reinhard Behrens
Lecturer, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
rbehrens1@btinternet.com
www.naboland.co.uk


Biography

Born 1951 in Germany, studied Drawing and Painting at Hamburg College of Art
and Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, awarded German Academic Exchange Grant (DAAD) to study for a year at Edinburgh College of Art in 1979, received Andrew Grant Travel Scholarship and settled in Scotland. Visiting lectureships acquainted me with all four art colleges before accepting my ongoing lectureship as drawing tutor at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design.
My prints and other artistic work has been exhibited internationally and from 1989 to 1991 I was president of the Society of Scottish Artists, receiving a variety of awards.

Illustrated Talk

40 Years of Expeditions into Naboland
My talk will illustrate the importance of found objects as a stimulus to developartistic concepts that can trigger and sustain life long obsessions kept manageable by the application of artistic skill and a dose of humour. The artist and the traveller share the role as bystander and observer and the travelling artist keeps the opportunity to experience life and environments with fresh eyes and an open mind in its purest state.
In 1974 I found a toy submarine on the German North Sea coast. The following year while working as an archaeological draughtsman in West Turkey I came across a newspaper that reported the collision between a Turkish submarine and a Swedish cargo ship in the Bosporus. The name of that cargo ship was “NABOLAND”. In the feverish haze of a mild sun stroke I linked this incident with my toy submarine and felt a vision of how my little tin traveller could in time explore aspects of NABOLAND. This vision has remained the guiding light for my artistic progress ever since.Real and imagined travels have helped to feed the development of Naboland and through the artistic media of printmaking, drawing, painting and installation it has gained a momentum that has established itself in the minds of visitors to my exhibitions for the last four decades. My detailed drawing style relished the many visual sources that the British Empire had generated and allowed me to give my work a nostalgic warmth and quirky humour in equal dose. Over the last few years I have been working on the creation of a short animated film in a newsreel style, “Naboland News”, that shows sightings of the submarine in a variety of settings all of which add to the evidence of the existence of Naboland.

Exhibition 

The Naboland Interior
My installation is the culmination of 40 years of expeditions into Naboland and contains elements of various chapters of its genesis.The Antarctic explorer’s hut of the early years is expanded to include elements of the Far East, the Arabian deserts and the Norse world of Shetland, all adding up to a “Wunderkammer” that fills the viewer’s mind with a sense of nostalgic reassurance and the voyeuristic thrill of witnessing a parallel world from an earlier time. The sense of strangeness is increased by the reduced scale of many of the displayed objects and their genuine age lures the viewer into a world of forlorn shores of the High Arctic, the bleached deserts of Inner Arabia and the oxygen-rare Tibetan Plateau, all presented as if coming from distant outposts of the British Empire.

Humour enters this set up by the arrangement of the objects that assume a scientific appearance through careful placing and allowing associations with all the above mentioned contexts.
Next to this three-dimensional structure will be framed etchings from my early travels to Naboland when expeditions with the Edinburgh University Mountaineering Club took me into the magnificent Scottish landscape and it was easy to imagine myself being a member of Scott’s desperate South Pole party while following my mountaineering friends through the mist of an exposed ridge or camping in snow.
These images solely use black ink as I was always intrigued and satisfied by the tonal range that can be achieved by just using the various marks that the medium of etching allows. Quite often found objects are juxtaposed with Scottish landscapes to generate the appearance of archaeological illustrations with the possibility of introducing an element of whimsy by the choice of objects so that the on first impression serious arrangement of shapes turns both humorous and poetical.