Not that I consider myself a painter, but painting is beautiful. Afterwards, unlike writing, you don't have black fingers, but red and blue ones. Hermann Hesse. Hermann Hesse shares the dual talent of being both a painter and a poet with many of his literary colleagues, including Goethe, Gottfried Keller, and Adalbert Stifter, as well as Wilhelm Busch and Joachim Ringelnatz, Henry Miller, Peter Weiss, and Günter Grass. Since his self-taught beginnings during World War I, which helped the then forty-year-old overcome a serious crisis, Hesse painted around 2000 watercolors well into his old age. Most of them are love letters to the colorful landscapes of his chosen home in Ticino and their then still inexhaustible wealth of enchanting motifs. Over the last two decades, a large part of these paintings has been successfully located and made accessible to the public.