What is it?

The most popular term for what I do is Biomech, or Biomechanical. Organic, fractal or just “mech” is also quite popular, but it doesnt really describe what we do and in the family of artists who gravitate to this style, we call it just biomech to keep things simple.

The term that I have developed for how my work feels is “bio-flow”.

In science, biomechanics describe movement and reactions of biological organisms, in short, the movement of life. This romantic notion informs what I do but it doesn’t quite tell you what it is.
I don’t want to just recreate what I see when I draw from nature, copy forms and colours and textures. I want others to see how I interpret it, study it, and understand it.

You could draw landscapes or scenes of wildlife if you enjoy recreating nature as it presents itself, but what I personally enjoy about nature is the way things grow and move. Movement, fast or slow fascinates me.

When you look at a piece of wood where the branches intersect with the vertical growth and create a knot, a circle with lines around it is formed. These patterns grew around each other over a long period of time, yet when I look at the way water flows around a rock in a river, it displays almost identical movement as the wood grain flowing around a branch. These two patterns were created over very different timescales, yet the turbulence, eddies and flow of the different materials is almost the same.

There are absolute truths in our universe. Everything follows the same rules no matter if something is alive or dead, fast or slow, big or small and studying movement is the best way to understand this visually without much knowledge or science background.
To me drawing these patterns is almost like figuring out the language of nature. Like deciphering hieroglyphs of an ancient civilization. Trying to fake gods signature… ;)

I find having a visual language that explains how the universe works very satisfying and reassuring.
It gives my life more meaning and helps me to be effective and calm without having to be locked down in constant self control. Sounds a bit much, I know but I am serious and I can explain.

My artform to me is a way to let my mind flow. It’s the only way I can truly turn the background chatter off and meditate. But meditation can be achieved in many ways and that’s nothing new.
I always had a hard time being calm and centered. I used to struggle for control of my life and people within it. I dealt with lots of anxiety and a need for affirmation and attention. But as it turns out, for me it is enough to feel like I understand something well enough. And observing nature and learning how to intuitively understanding how things seem to work has helped me a great deal.

I am struggling to explain things well with language and find expressing myself visually much more satisfying. Since I have to use language to explain this here, let me try to be a bit more visual in my writing. Hopefully it’ll sound less crazy.

Imagine Life is like a river and you’re thrown into it at birth.
By the time you learn how to swim you know a great deal about water.
But you still have no idea you’re in a river.  You’re swept along, tumbling in all directions, helplessly. You move with the flow of the water and therefore you can’t feel that the river is taking you along for a ride. You don’t anticipate the obstacles, dangers, eddies and turbulences that are in your future. It feels like you are standing still and all these problems are coming at you. How could that not feel personal, even hostile and scary. Not understanding you are the one that is moving within the flow makes the experience terrifying because it makes it look like you don’t have control.

But once you understand the rules of the river you can adjust yourself to look in the right direction, anticipate the obstacles and dangers, use your energy effectively. Slow down if you need to, get out of the way, realize when you are stuck. Now you know when it makes sense to expend energy to go against the flow for a bit or to navigate to a quite place when it presents itself. Or how to preserve energy and wait for an opportunity. Now you’re watching, learning, growing and moving at your own pace.
This is self control. You don’t control your life, but you can control yourself in it. Self control orients you towards a calm mind. Other people’s lives might intersect with yours and they might be along for the ride for a while. But whenever rivers intersect with each other there is turbulence and rules change slightly. Being aware of that helps to keep calm and make good decisions in almost any circumstance of life.   
Thinking about life in those terms has helped me immensely to deal with anxiety and nervousness and making good decisions for myself and having more time and energy to help others.

This has almost nothing to do with biomech anymore. I get it. But to me all of this is connected and informs almost everything I do or avoid doing.
Finding truth in the way nature presents itself visually has given me the illusion of understanding complex systems that would otherwise require intense study and comprehension of physics and mathematics. And even these ultimately complex branches of science only ever give an illusion of understanding. So it is unfair to judge who is on the right track with anything. If it is applicable to life, it is meaningful and worthwhile. I can apply these lessons to almost anything and visualize almost any situation I am presented with and act intuitively instead of trying to use language to have a confusing and possibly misleading conversation with myself. I can write about this a lot more but this is already personal enough at this point. If you now understand how deeply I have woven myself into my artform you can also appreciate that when you look at my work, you are looking at me.

OK, Lets emerge from the deep levels again. Stuff can get heavy when I talk about biomech.  
Whoever is still reading will understand that my art means a lot to me.
It probably saved my life a few times. If I wouldn’t have a huge authority problem I may have been able to study a more established form of truth-seeking, like theology, psychology, philosophy, biology, chemistry, physics or even math but I lack the patience and I have a problem with rules and authority. While most of these fascinate me and inform my work and life principles, there is an inherent arrogance and competition to all forms of truth seeking. I believe that language and communication itself is the main problem of why we cannot get on the same team, therefore I tend to keep my studies plainly visual.
Maybe science is the grammar and spirituality the vocabulary in the book of nature. Who knows? That sounds like we would have to enter an even deeper and poetic level. Let’s not…

In the end what matters most to me is that my work moves or stops people. I seek attention like everyone else. My naked mind is plainly visible in my art for all to see. You shouldn’t need to read any of this stuff to appreciate it on a plainly aesthetic level otherwise I am not getting it right.
Most things require endless amounts of study and exercise before they can be appreciated by someone who has no idea

So, I love the question, “what is it?”
It means you find something attractive and want to understand it better. That’s amazingly flattering and exceedingly rare.  
So, I don’t want you to know exactly what you are looking at because I don’t either.
I am just faking a signature. I don’t know what it says. 😉

Markus