Andrea Eichelberg

Andrea Eichelberg works under the name Libwa, short for Life Is Better With Art. Her abstract paintings combine acrylic, collage, weaving, and stitching, using color, texture, and layered gesture to address change, belonging, and emotional experience. Her work is intuitive in method but materially deliberate, often arriving through revision rather than a predetermined image.

Eichelberg’s earliest exposure to visual culture came through her father’s painting and decorating business. Her childhood home was filled with color cards, wallpaper books, and leftover materials from his projects. She spent hours studying combinations of color and pattern, while museum visits and her parents’ general encouragement of creativity established a lasting interest in art.

Her professional path initially moved elsewhere. Eichelberg earned a master’s degree in Business Administration and built an international career as an executive at a global technology company. Painting receded for many years. A later encounter with an immersive, color-saturated exhibition prompted her return to art, driven by a direct realization that she needed more color in her life.

Eichelberg is self-taught. Her practice is based on research, experimentation, and what she describes as the value of making “more bad art” in order to make better work. This attitude supports a willingness to try unfamiliar materials, dismantle paintings that are not working, and accept imperfect outcomes as part of the process.

Wabi-sabi is an important reference point. The Japanese philosophy, with its attention to imperfection, weathering, incompletion, and change, aligns with Eichelberg’s interest in surfaces that retain evidence of their making. A painting’s flaws do not necessarily need correction. They can become part of its character and direct its next stage.

Although the work is abstract, it begins with specific emotional or experiential concerns. Eichelberg rarely starts with a fixed outcome. A palette may emerge first, followed by marks, gestures, and accumulating layers. She paints in silence, using the studio to reduce daily distraction and focus on color, movement, and possibility. The process can require difficult decisions, including covering or removing elements she initially liked in order to strengthen the whole.

Nature and travel provide a continuing visual archive. Hiking in forests, walking through hills, and exploring unfamiliar cities have led to thousands of photographs that operate as a mood board rather than as literal source images. Eichelberg collects colors, reflections, textures, forms, and changing light, then draws on those impressions in the studio.

Her painting Flow demonstrates this method. The work was reworked for several months before reaching a turning point. Eichelberg eventually used a bath brush loaded with pale blue and white paint to suggest water moving across the surface, allowing stronger colors beneath to remain visible. The painting came together only after she stopped trying to control it too closely.

Change and belonging are recurring themes. Eichelberg has lived and worked in Germany, the United States, Italy, and Belgium, experiences that have shaped her attention to cultural difference and to the question of what makes a person feel at home. Her paintings do not illustrate these experiences directly, but they are informed by movement between places and by the emotional adjustments that accompany it.

She cites Etel Adnan, Helen Frankenthaler, and Gerhard Richter as important artists. Richter’s repeated willingness to cover over paintings and begin again has been especially instructive. For Eichelberg, it confirms that uncertainty and revision are not evidence of failure, but part of sustained artistic work.

Creative blocks are handled through changes in material or technique rather than through force. Eichelberg thinks of the practice in seasons. One area of work may be resting while another is active. In one instance, she wove together two unsuccessful paintings and turned them into a new work. This acceptance of shifting conditions gives her practice flexibility without abandoning discipline.

Eichelberg has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Germany and the United States. She is currently developing a personal series, Holding Fast & Letting Go, focused on family, dignity, love, and the challenge of valuing what remains while accepting what changes over time. The paintings retain her characteristic color and movement, addressing difficult subject matter without losing their sense of play.

Her advice to emerging artists is uncomplicated: play often, experiment freely, and follow what sustains curiosity. In Eichelberg’s practice, experimentation is not a preliminary step to “real” work. It is the condition that makes the work possible.