Paul Klee on Baltrum
About the art of making the essential visible.

100 years ago, Paul Klee spent a holiday on Baltrum with his family, as I did today. To mark the occasion, the island museum is showing an exhibition of his paintings created here that is well worth seeing.

For me, it is exciting to experience the island landscape, and Klee’s perception transformed into a painting in quick succession. In my post-processing, I then found this quote by Klee:

Art does not reproduce the visible but makes it visible.

This reminds me that I, too, see what I do ultimately as art, in which it is essential to grasp and communicate the essence of what is happening, its basic pattern.

In coaching, too, it is about making the fundamentally visible perceptible and raising it into the consciousness of those involved in the counselling.

To do this, one needs the ability to perceive broadly, unfocussed and very concentrated, and a knowledge fed by experience about what could be discovered.

Our project L-I-A-M, which @antje, @diane and I are launching in mid-November, deals with precisely this process.

I am convinced that the ability to perceive basic patterns is part of our basic equipment as humans and can be strengthened through training. The Aristotelian way of thinking in our Western cultures tempts us all too easily to lose ourselves in details and to overlook essential things at the edge of our field of vision.

This is particularly the case because our culture’s love of detail has led to great successes in the natural sciences and technology.

However, when dealing with complex issues, it is crucial to allow our brains to recognise patterns and make them available to us again in the form of intuitive ideas.

I would be delighted to receive your questions and suggestions!

I am Eberhard Bohrisch, a systemic psychologist and one of the few active coaches with more than 50 years of professional experience.