The Beginning
FREEDOM OVER
Money
Anuk Rocha only started painting one year ago. Or at least, that's the official version. The truer version is that she has been preparing for this moment all her life — through an obsessive childhood drawing practice that never quite left her, through years of every job on earth, through a burnout at 27 that ended one era and quietly insisted another begin.
Born in Hagen, Germany, Rocha left her family at 18. She worked relentlessly: job after job, the grinding accumulation of a life organised entirely around necessity. Then, at 27, her body and mind simply said no. The burnout was definitive. And in its wake, something clarified. "From that point on I organised my life around the idea of freedom over money," she says. It is a sentence that sounds simple and is, in practice, a radical act.
She turned down material comfort. She figured out ways to sustain herself without a regular job — a form of living she has maintained ever since. And slowly, in the space that freedom created, the things she had loved as a child began to return. Music first: she and her husband founded the band Drab City. Then, recently, painting.
Also Listen To
Before the canvases, there was the band. Rocha and her husband make music together under the name Drab City — a project that, like her painting, exists at the intersection of intimacy, atmosphere, and a particular quality of quiet devastation.
On Influence & Seeing
THE SOUL INSIDE
Things
Influences
Q
What inspires you and where does influence actually come from?
Since I was a kid I have always perceived these great energies coming from objects and places. I have feelings about objects or a certain, specific spot on a street or in a room which almost have a human personality to me. It is like a soul lives in them — which is pretty much what I try to convey in my paintings.
Creative Process
PORT LIGHT,
GREEK VASES &
Getting It Right
Q
Walk us through how a painting actually begins.
I walk around and look at things. I admire the construction or nature of a place. I often turn around them for a while to figure out how they achieved the look that they have, and what it is that I like so much about them. I then put a lot of those moments down in a drawing or take photos to draw them later if I don't have my sketchbook with me.
Living right on the port by the fishermen and their boats in Marseille, Rocha has extraordinary raw material to draw from. She sources colour palettes from the objects the fishermen use, from the houses surrounding the little port, from details scattered around town that accumulate in her sketchbook and eventually migrate to canvas.
Her most recent series took Greek vase reliefs as its starting point — found on Marseille's buildings and walls, remnants of a city that was once a Greek settlement some 2,500 years ago. The ancient and the contemporary, embedded in the same stone.
On Preparation
"I sketch it out in multiple ways, try different colours and compositions before I hit the canvas. I have to figure out the exact look of the painting before I start painting — making an ugly painting really frustrates me so I try to be a little more prepared before I start a big project."
"There can't be an icon when everyone is their own icon."
— Anuk RochaOn Culture & Our Times
THE INTERNET
TORE US APART INTO
Millions of Microcosms
Q
Who do you consider to be an icon of our time?
That's really hard to say for me since I'm such a melancholic person and we live in very nostalgic times. It is like since the internet has become a real alternate reality, society has stopped functioning and does not produce any culture anymore, at least not in first world countries. Everything is a revival now.
Rocha's diagnosis cuts sharper than nostalgia. She distinguishes between the past as reference point — something artists have always used — and the past as something to be literally reproduced. We now have access to so much information about every era that we no longer process it and move forward. We just replay it. "Movies look exactly like they were shot in the 70s," she observes. "Kids these days dress exactly the way I dressed when I was 14. It's spooky."
An icon, for Rocha, is a specific thing: "a product of a time, a movement, a representative that has it all — someone who carries that global spirit of the young and does it in a way no one ever has done before." That requires a shared culture, a collective consciousness, a movement. And movements require people to see themselves as part of something larger than themselves.
The internet, she argues, has made that almost impossible. It has fractured us into individually tended microcosms — each person a curator of their own identity, each identity reinforced by algorithmic echo. "We cannot change or put anything in motion if we don't start seeing ourselves as part of a bigger world." It is, for a painter who finds souls inside objects and emotions in the specific angle of a street corner, a genuinely felt loss.
On the Pandemic
The pandemic, Rocha reflects, enhanced all the mental problems she'd had before — and paradoxically made her more productive. Painting helped her regain perspective, kept her from overthinking, and ignited an urgent clarity: the need to reach that specific place she wants to be in her work. "I've lost many people during the pandemic and it lit an urge in me, to really try getting to that place I want to be in life."
Find the Work
A PAINTER WORTH
Following
Anuk Rocha is one year into a painting practice that feels, by her own admission, like the fulfilment of everything that came before it. The burnout. The band. The years of figuring out how to live free. The hours walking Marseille's port looking at fishing boats and Greek reliefs and the specific way light falls on a wall painted four centuries ago.
All of it, the material. All of it, the preparation. And now, finally, the canvas.
