The following article is from our September 2008 issue.

Painting for the World Through Cyberspace Real and surreal Internet creations by Germans in the Périgord, where mankind's first artists dwelled - By Uwe Siemon-Netto

A recent essay in the European edition of Time magazine proclaimed "The death of French Culture." But in France's Périgord region, where mankind's first painters created sophisticated images on cave walls 16,000 years ago, a thriving intercontinental colony of artists is helping to fill the void that has kicked off an anguished debate. Among them are two extraordinary Germans using 21st-century technology: They paint through cyberspace, and North America is their main market.

There are five things Liza Hirst and Manfred Märschenz have in common: German is their mother tongue; both are prolific figurative painters; they attended one of the finest art schools, the University of the Fine Arts in Berlin; both live in beautifully converted farmhouses in the Périgord, which Henry Miller once described as "the closest approximation of paradise." Both exhibit their works in the London-based cyber-gallery Saatchi Online, and the Internet is a significant tool of their trade in other ways as well.

But here the resemblance ends. For one thing, says Liza Hirst, "Manfred is an eccentric, while there's nothing eccentric about me." Hirst, a painter much admired in the Périgord arts community for her portraits, is a realist who calls her style "classical modern." Manfred Märschenz by contrast seeks to "break reality" in the enigmatic way of the 16th-century Milan Mannerist Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526-1593), who depicted Emperor Rudolf II in the form of a still life of vegetables and flowers. Mannerism had a great influence on Dadaism, Cubism and especially Surrealism four centuries later. Call Märschenz a Surrealist Cyber Mannerist and you've got him about right.

Seemingly unreal aspects of Märschenz' life may have helped shape his work. A saddler's son, he was born in a Berlin air raid shelter during one of the worst bombing nights near the end of World War II. Sixteen years later, he slipped from East to West Berlin literally minutes before the Communists sealed off their part of the city on Aug. 13, 1961, ultimately building the Berlin Wall. In the free part of Berlin, he trained as a carpenter, painted and worked on film sets with his Dutch girlfriend Anneke, who is now his wife. With Anneke, a film costume designer, he also made it to Hollywood at the invitation of actor Robert Mitchum.

These days, he tries to emulate Arcimboldo's 16th-century sense of allegory by linking it to the electronic age. With a computer mouse, he converts photographs surrealistically into "digipaintings." In one, a brilliant red sky contrasts with a bright green grasshopper clinging to Märschenz' hairy finger. "Nature on my Finger," he titled the picture hanging in the exhibition room in his farmhouse.

He e-mailed this image, like all of his other electronic creations, to a specialist printer in Berlin. Using a process called Electron Impact Chemical Ionization, or EICE, the printer transferred it to a large piece of fabric that can be machine-washed at 40 degrees Celsius (104 F) and even ironed without putting the work of art at risk.

Back in his farmhouse surrounded by fields and woods near Nanteuil in the Dordogne, as the Périgord has been called since the French Revolution, Märschenz mounted the fabric on a frame, signed and dated it - and voilà, an original neo-Mannerist Märschenz, whose style is receiving international attention due to his cyber-exhibitions: A prominent Miami art dealer has just asked Märschenz to visit him in Florida. After countless days and nights behind his computer screen, he says, "I have finally found the perfect medium to express myself."

Hirst does not paint with a mouse; she uses brushes. She and her German husband Hubert live a 30-minute drive away on 13 acres of farmland outside Siorac-de-Ribérac. A down-to-earth mother of two, she was born in Kingston, Ontario to a German mother and an English father. Hirst holds both British and Canadian citizenship but considers herself culturally a German, especially as Germany was the country where she has spent most of her life.

If Märschenz survived impecunious times in his artistic career by working as a carpenter, Hirst did so by teaching German in a French high school and painting classes in her home. Then she found a way to make her art a bread-and-butter business - thanks to the Internet. Every morning, she produces an exquisite little oil painting on a 15x15 centimeter (5.9 by 5.9 inch) canvas panel. That done, she photographs it and places it on a website called dailypainters.com.

A cyberspace art gallery, dailypainters.com is the brainchild of Colorado artist Micah Condon. Each of its 140 members pays a $29 monthly fee. This entitles them to offer a new painting on this space everyday, which international art lovers surf. When they buy, they do so via Paypal, a cyber-bank. "I have already sold hundreds of small paintings this way, charging ?100 ($150) a piece," Hirst said. As soon as she is notified of a sale, she ships her artwork off to her clients, mainly Americans, but also Australians, British, Canadians, Chileans, Japanese, Norwegians, South Africans and Turks. "Sixty percent are women," she remarked.

Her motifs can be anything in her immediate environment, from landscapes to street scenes in southwestern France and pets. But portraits are her greatest strength. One of her most dazzling recent pictures is a haunting yet thoroughly authentic depiction of Huw Thomas, a sphinx-like Welsh junk dealer and local character in the small town of Verteillac. "My God, she has really grasped the core of this inscrutable man," marveled Graham Williams, a Paris-based British art aficionado.

Encouraged by her success, Hirst now intends to return to her preferred genre - large oils, spectacular samples of which cover the walls of her lofty studio. "For a while, I had lost heart to do those big ones when financial circumstances forced me to do other work," she said.

So log on for lots of large images, both realist and surrealist, hitting cyberspace from the former dwelling place of gifted Cro-Magnon artists in southwestern France. Not that these Germans will single-handedly set France free from its current state of stagnation, which art historian Wilfried Rogasch finds so dispiriting, according to a recent article in the New Zealand Herald, titled "Paris frets over its backwater standing." Märschenz nodded: "The art scene here is sadly hollow and contrived." Hirst said that the French avant-garde trend of "trying to be original without substance has encouraged me to stick to traditional painting."

It's not surprising that among the world's 10 most widely shown artists, there is not a single Frenchman. Christophe Boicos, a Paris gallery owner, recently bemoaned France's artistic identity crisis and urged this nation to redefine itself culturally at the opening of the 21st century. If Hirst, the realist, Märschenz, the surrealist Mannerist and a whole army of other excellent foreign expatriate painters and sculptors residing in this former colossus of culture give their hosts a hand to this end, clearly no harm will be done.