4000 years BC Mesopotamia, the land between the Euphrates and Tigris, was populated by the Sumerians. They lived under harsh climatic conditions in a fertile plain.

The Sumerians and their Semitic successors had a logical and scientific way of thinking, which shows especially in their culture of writing. Around 2700 BC writing experienced a revolutionary development. For centuries the Sumerians had used archaic pictographic symbols. Around 1700 BC a cuneiform writing was developed. The former way of writing which used a sharp pen to scratch the symbols in a board of clay was very cumbersome. A writing tool was invented to press cuneiform marks in a soft clay board. Until a few decades ago archeologists believed that writing was invented in a certain place, which was believed to be Uruk in Mesopotamia, and from there spread out over the world. In the meantime this belief has been abandoned by the majority of researchers.
There are cultures with a long tradition where writing was seen as a form of art. In the Arab-Islamic culture that prohibits pictures of humans and other living things writing developed as an art form, the Arabic calligraphy. The aim is to bring writing to a perfection. In the Islamic world the calligraphic aesthetics is a natural component of the traditional written culture.

In my paintings I use Arabic characters with black and gray color on white paper. The texts are mere compositions of word fragments with sometimes symbolic or mystical meaning.