By Frederick Philander WINDHOEK The 7th solo exhibition of artist Gerdis Stadtherr, titled “Flow” was officially opened last night at the National Gallery of Namibia and will run for the next two weeks. In a press release she had been quoted as saying about her art work: “I started off by depicting structures of flowing water, and suddenly I began seeing ‘flow’ everywhere – in recycling, in falling leaves, in whirlwinds, in music. Since modern man has much easier access to visual rather than audial information, I decided to explore the visual potential of music,” she said. “My first try was a Carl Maria v. Weber theme from one of his clarinet concertos. I chose the spontaneous medium of soft pastels to put my vision in colours onto paper. The result was an abstract that led nowhere. I let it rest there. “Some time later, I came across a book cover with a figure of Mexican painter Diego Rivera, and suddenly it clicked: those two images shifted on top of each other like different windows on a computer screen. When my granddaughter saw the nearly-finished painting, she titled it: ‘The Cell Phone Lady’. So it was a joint effort, combining totally different sources,” Gerdis said. She further said that she was digging into the theme of depicting music. “I realized that my aversion for classical music stems from music pollution, meaning the overall use of classical snippets or jingles in warehouses, on the radio, on cell phones, etc., and the way classical music is used in order to induce financial gain – subconsciously absorbing these snippets can radically influence your mood and your actions,” she recalled. “From there, it was a short way to realizing that contemporary classics are extremely seldomly performed in public, and to find a visual approach to these partly non-formally structured pieces – for example the ‘Te Deum’ (Arvo Paert) – was a challenge I could not resist. And from there, the way led directly to ‘Sounds of the Earth’ and ‘Super Sounds’. Come and see for yourself whether you can ‘hear’ my colours, my paintings,” she urged.