About
My name is Sven Mahr. I was born and I am living in Dresden. By far the most beautiful city in East-Germany. Traveled the world, but always returned to this jewel near the river “Elbe”. Dresden. With its unique mixture of nature, baroque architecture and a very lively fresh and open-minded district called “Neustadt” were most of the young people, artists, freaks live and backpackers stay. Very inspiring place to be.
For over 12 years painting and drawing was my passion. Art become my life, my precious tool to express my inner life without speech and to reflect back on the question “What am I?”.
Words were never enough. Art is my original meditation, that helped me to return to my original mind of “no-inside, no outside”. The state of mind, the incredible flow- experience, the artist enters when deeply being absorbed in the process of only DOING IT. There is no thinking, checking, worrying and so on. Only this very moment – here and now.
I continued my artwork, while studying and finishing a masters degree in Philosophy and Art-history at the University of Dresden. Though the questions of Life and Death, and deep inner struggle of my early twenties, I wanted to investigate my mind deeper and more focused, in that time art was not enough anymore for me.
And so I found another “tool”: Yoga & Zen-Meditation. Since than Yoga & Zen practice became my Path. For a couple years my life was completely focused an meditation. In 2008 I attended a 90-day retreat, meditating in silence in a temple deep in the mountains of South Korea. That changed my life forever. I dropped the pen and the brush after coming back. It felt like: Everything I ever wanted to tell to the world has been said. It was just fine as IT IS. Not necessary to put more onto the world.
So I picked up a camera since still there was this childish curiosity … to express this creativity. Photography and film became interessting, because it really captures the moment or … the illusion of it. Because as a meditator, you have to ask yourself: What is really real? What is the TRUTH?
With the training of a painter I just look at things and captured it. Going and perceiving this world moment to moment. There are weeks and days, where no photo is taken. Recently I started to do film also… but the burning question is the same:
W h a t i s s e e i n g t h i s ? … W h a t ? … ?
This is were my art comes from.
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Shooting with a Nikon D5000 with simple lenses: Nikkor 18-105mm 1:3,5-5,6G VR and a Nikkor AF-S 50mm, 1:1,8.
