About me...

Blick aus meinem Fenster 1974

Born in Wiesbaden, Germany in the last millennium, as an adolescent I had two hobbies: playing soccer and drawing, neither of which obsessively. I could draw as much as I wanted: My grandfather had speculated on paper shortages in the 1960s, and so one day, I discovered countless packages of typewriter paper in his cellar, which I could scribble on or fold into paper airplanes and banger bags.

The pathetic art classes at a German elementary- and high school could not completely eradicate my love of art. At the age of 13, I was lucky enough to meet an outstanding teacher at the American School of Paris, who fired up my interest in art and art history: Professor Brandt Kingsley, who unfortunately died in 2019, took interested students to various artists and exhibitions in down-town Paris.  Thanks to him, I also had the opportunity to meet the crème de la crème of the German art scene at the vernissage of the exhibition “Art Allemagne Aujourd’hui”.  After this vanity fair, I knew that being an artist is definitely not “my thing”.  My favorite artist of that time was Paul Cézanne. (The two copies of Cézanne paintings on the right were made at the time with wax crayons).

In the mid 1970s, during a vacation in Portugal, my father bought a house with a big pool and a large garden in the Algarve.  This was “my Giverny” and for many years, my pictures showing palm trees and sunsets at the sea adorned Casa Borboleta. 

The American school was then sponsored by IBM and as a result had excellent computer equipment. Even though the computers did not yet have graphics capabilities, many of my classmates and I were fascinated by the new possibilities and initially spent even the weekends in the computer center to write programs in Basic.  The school had many great teachers. The Principal of the upper school, Michael Pollicott (himself an artist whose ingenious drawings anticipated Zentangle’s “invention” 15 years later), taught “Economics” so competently and excitingly that I went on to study this subject later at University.   My English teacher, Michael Brenson, in whose classes literature from (my favorite writer) Albert Camus to Faulkner to Henry Beston’s “The outermost house” was intensively discussed, joined the NY Times as an art critic.  Torn between art, soccer, Basic and everything else you do as a teenager, there was little time for the more banal things in life, like school lessons. However, my grade point average was still sufficient for a U.S. University Scholarship, although to this day it is still not completely clear whether I received the scholarship for my academic – or my soccer achievements. 

Before I left for the USA, I had the opportunity to study “Theory of Knowledge” for a great summer long at the “United World College of the Atlantic” in Wales

Arriving at Drew University, I was immediately connected through soccer in the Varsity Team, and also benefited from my computer skills: I was able to write my papers at the Computer Center with a text editor (instead of using a typewriter). A friend at the Center got me my first “minimum-wage-job” there. I studied Economics and Art (as a Minor).  My spirited and outstanding art professor, Michael Peglau, was very well connected to the New York City art scene and, if I remember correctly, influenced by the (contemporary German) Expressionists.  Interesting that he seems to paint rather photo-realistically today.

Two years later, the US dollar reached new highs and my father suggested that I move back to Paris, to the American University.  Here I had to change my “Major” to “International Business Administration“, and was fortunately able to take most of the “Credits” with me. I vaguely remember a professor of ancient Greek art history, she was German, and her classes were as bloodless as an ancient Kouros.  So I preferred to use my season ticket for the Centre Pompidou, which didn’t cost much for students at that time. But there were also good teachers at the AUP: Dr. William Evans, for example, was competent and his marketing course was exciting.   Here, too, I made diligent use of the possibilities offered by IT, helped a doctoral student with the statistical evaluation of his thesis using SPSS and learned Fortran, APL and LOGO on the side. The AUP soccer team was quite good (even compared to the Parisian university teams we played against) and was made up of talented English, Greek, Persian, Norwegian and Moroccan players. In my last year as captain of the team, I was allowed to make sure that the jerseys were washed after the games.  

At some point my studies were over and, when I returned to Germany, I tried my hand at working as an organization programmer in a computer boutique.  Coming back is always hard, but after three months, in which I was able to get used to life in Germany again, I was hired as a management trainee at a small logistics company called DHL Worldwide Express, for which I was able to develop a location analysis based on regression analysis.  After half a year, however, I qualified for  Bank of America’sWorld Banker Development Program“, a two year MBA program in San Francisco, London and “on-the-job” in Frankfurt.  Here I met my wife, we started a family and the next years I had little time for painting. However, my two children still complain today that there is no church or monastery between here and Bordeaux that I did not drag them into. They have survived.

As a balance to my job as a banker, I read books on physics, cosmology, string theory, fractals, Wolfram’s “A New Kind of Science” etc. during this time. My original fascination with science gave way to skepticism, because the epistemological power of the physical world view results from the interaction of the Standard Model of elementary particle physics and that of cosmology.  However, there is a fundamental incompatibility between quantum physics and relativity.  I came to the conclusion that physics cannot describe, let alone explain, the creation of the world and began to ponder the question of the creative power of the universe. I have tried to deal with many of these topics in my paintings.

Although I was hired twice by French banks and was allowed to experience “management by the lord of the manor”, my affection for France, the place of my youth, grew steadily over the years. So every year I cross the border several times to buy red wine, pâtés, cheese, etc.: The very things I didn’t appreciate much as a youngster in France, when I longed for German (sweat) butter, cold cut, dark bread and cakes. 

As the children grew older and thus had some time available, I started to paint again, also because in some ways, painting is the opposite of working on a computer.  Today, color and texture play a big role for me because texture is not so simple to replicate with a PC and color printer.

I still love Paul Cézanne’s paintings and of course I generally appreciate Impressionism – which was omnipresent in Paris. But in the meantime I have gotten to know other artists from the era who created art at least as great as Manet, Monet, Renoir and van Gogh.  Other painters from this epoch whom I appreciate very much include André Derain, Joaquim Sorolla, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, among others.

After a successfully completed course in web design with WordPress, I started to create my own websites.  Soon after I came across a powerful video editing program, DaVinci Resolve, and I decided to produce clips about my paintings to present them on my website.  And so, little by little, some of my work is coming from the roof truss to the light of the world.  I had underestimated the amount of work in the beginning and the learning curve is still enormous…

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