Alois Carigiet

In retrospect, Carigiet described the move as an "emigration to the low-lands", from a "mountain boy's paradise" to a "gloomy apartment on the ground floor in a narrow town alley".

[4] Carigiet visited primary and secondary schools in Chur, as well as the "Kantonsschule", the canton's gymnasium, which he quit in 1918 in order to start an apprenticeship as a decorative designer and draftsman with master painter Martin Räth.

While learning the art of graining, marbleizing, gold plating and other techniques of decorative art in Räth's atelier, Carigiet spent a lot of his spare time filling volumes of sketchbooks with drawings of rural and urban scenes, farm animals and pets, anatomical studies of heads and beaks of the birds exhibited at Chur's natural history museum, as well as with numerous caricatures of his acquaintances and family.

Räth noticed the apprentice's talent as well, and one of Carigiet's appointed creations, an assembly of decorated vases for the Siebler & Co. shop windows, seems to have received particular appreciation.

[5] After having completed his apprenticeship, Carigiet sought work in Zürich and started a job as a practical trainee with Max Dalang's advertisement agency in 1923, where he soon learned the techniques of graphic design and was hired as a regular employee.

After having won several competitions and having gained a reputation, Carigiet opened his own graphic atelier in Zürich in 1927, employing up to six people at times, due to the constantly large volume of orders his business received.

Carigiet's paintings increasingly depicted everyday motifs from his home canton Graubünden and occasionally Zürich, but also from further trips to France, Spain, and Lapland in the mid-1930s.

[10][11] While spending a holiday in Trun in May 1939, Carigiet hiked to "Platenga", a hamlet on one of the terraces in the community of Obersaxen, where, in his own words, he was immediately fascinated by the landscape's vastness and untouchedness and the feeling of a newly found, long lost paradise.

Carigiet wished to dedicate his life to art and observation, spending hours a day, equipped with a pair of binoculars and a sketch book, tracking down the alpine fauna.

The story follows the boy Ursli's perilous climb through snow to an abandoned summer hut in order to retrieve a large trychel for the annual Chalandamarz celebration on 1 March.

In a speech held in Zürich in 1962, he described his works as "narrative art" in a century of abstraction, and named Georges Rouault, "the greatest of all", as an exemplary inspiration for his artistic approach.