Gottfried Tritten once said that he felt a closer relationship to the landscape, especially to the mountains, than to people. Mountain – man – painting.

Although this seems to be an almost paradoxical statement from the point of view of his fellow human beings and, above all, his numerous students, we should take this very personal assessment seriously.

Of course he also loved people and took an interest in them. Would he otherwise have trained drawing teachers for decades and also written books on art education for children and young people? Moreover, although he was a strict teacher, as a person he was an extremely popular, sociable and loving contemporary.

This makes his statement all the more striking. It shows how deeply and intimately he loved the landscape and the mountains. Of course, he grew up in Lenk in Simmental in the mountains of the Swiss Alps. But his interest in the forms and signs of the landscape, the inscription of nature and the spiritual, symbolic world on the mountains, actually went much deeper. This was evident everywhere in his work.

In his paintings, he often combined people dear and important to him, such as his mother or his daughter, and often his muses, with images of his favourite mountains and landscape symbols. He embedded them in each other, painted over them with himself, weaving them together in his world of memories and emotions. This resulted in combinations, sometimes even permutations of his inner world. This web of meaning was supplemented with symbolic representations of spiritual principles, which he drew from his interest in psychology and – in particular – Eastern philosophy. The sneeze, for example, as the iconic mountain, the triangle with its base in the physical world and its tip pointing into the spiritual world.

For Gottfried Tritten, painting was always a means of communicating with this spiritual world. So: mountain – man – painting!