Art stele Will Sohl

He loved the island in all its seasons. He initially lived here in a disused railway carriage, hopping on his bicycle every day to search for motifs," recalled Will Sohl's granddaughter. For the painter, Sylt became, by his own admission, an artistic home that continually inspired him. "I owe all my work to this island; it's as if it were made for me," wrote Sohl in a letter to his wife Ruth, whom he married in 1932. In her, he had a hands-on, hardworking wife at his side who took care of all the chores of everyday life, enabling her husband to do what he loved most: paint – day and night, if possible. Will Sohl first visited Sylt in 1936, the very year that he and his family settled permanently in Heidelberg. Before that, he had studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf and then art history and archaeology at the universities of Cologne, Zurich, and Berlin. The aspiring painter held his first exhibition in 1928 in Mannheim, neighboring his hometown. He later received long-term support from the former director of the Mannheim Kunsthalle, Fritz Wichert. Sohl didn't meet him in Mannheim, however, but in Kampen, where Wichert had moved in 1936. Kampen, along with Heidelberg, also became a home for Will Sohl: Between 1936 and 1961, with the exception of the war years, he visited the island at various times of the year. Here, he created large-scale compositions with often strongly contrasting colors. Will Sohl paid particular attention to the Sylt Wadden Sea: "In his search for a valid form, I found in the narrow strip between sea and land the identity of all forms produced by nature." A newspaper noted in 1948: "As something of a novelty within painting, Sohl discovered the fauna of the mudflats and repeatedly depicted it in painterly form." In a letter from 1937, Will Sohl wrote: "Today was a hard day, snow squalls swept every half hour. I sat behind a wall in Munkmarsch, painting as best I could, and admiring the beautiful, colorful clouds racing black across the brilliant blue, the horizon pale yellow, the water a peculiar green." The painter felt committed to the Expressionist art style, about which one art historian wrote: "With his evocative pictures, Will Sohl leads us not only into the world of fantasy, but also into the world of color." After a trip to the Lofoten Islands, Will Sohl died at the age of just 63.