"The transformation process of painting takes all the power of the brain and the body. I change when I work; I change. Figures repeat themselves like the signs of an alphabet, they are surrounded by landscapes and resist them. The painting is a skin that I shed, the drawing from within and from without. I have to bring it precisely into the picture with hand and head like something alive." Stöhrer himself named his work with convulsion, twitching or shaking spasm, his struggle for his own artistic expression, which forced him to go to the clinic not only once in his younger years with states of exhaustion. He defined his very personal, emotionally charged artistic approach as  "intrapsychic realism". This pictorial development also makes it so difficult to "explain" Walter Stöhrer's works. At first glance, there is little on the large canvases to guide the viewer in terms of content. Literary texts - especially ancient philosophers and French surrealists - but also musical ideas often provided him with inspiration for his painterly and graphic works. Here he found his own inner experiences. He used text fragments as working titles for his painting process and usually wrote them on the canvas first. Often, when the finished painting had moved away from the working title in the process of painting, it was given another title that corresponded more precisely to "what can be read visually". It is well known that we do not see things as they are, but as we are. Stöhrer said it more beautifully and painted it more expressively: "And the history all around occupies each of us with its own distortions".