paint stories for 1oo years...
adventurous private
and professional life ; )
The themes of my paintings come out of my experience as a psychoanalytically trained psychiatrist and from my social and political worldviews, as well as from my baroque-Catholic upbringing in Europe, from the fairytales of my childhood, and the cultural experience of a European in America.
The strongest influence on my art comes from the Viennese School of Fantastic Realism and from Friedrich Hundertwasser, from surrealism, German Expressionism, Gustav Klimt, and some young contemporary New York artists (Aaron Olshan, Sarah Bedford).
I like to tell stories with my paintings which often turn out to be whimsical, tragic-comical, grotesque, about abnormal, surrealist mental conditions, celebrating metamorphoses and transformations, human suffering and dissolution. Many themes are about aging, disappearance of organic and inorganic forms and their reappearance in altered shapes. For that reason I like to paint in multiple layers and possibly overpaint everything in the end.
I used to paint mostly figuratively in oil, acrylic, and pastels. In the last two to three years I have been painting more abstract or a mixture of abstract with scattered realistic elements or collages of all imaginable objects.. I also experiment with etchings, monoprints, and encaustic work, tonal charcoal, and ink.
Some Background...
Born and raised in post World War II Vienna, Austria, I attended Medical School at the University of Vienna which, lucky for me, turned out to be the second best art school in town. The teachers made us copy human anatomy from huge blackboards throughout medical school. After graduation I specialized in Anatomic Pathology which demands some good manual talents and recognition of visual patterns. In 1976 I received a fellowship to Stanford University in California. I decided to stay in California and do a residency training in psychiatry. I ended up working for the State of CA and the County of Los Angeles for indigent patients, and also as an assistant clinical professor in psychiatry at the University of California in Los Angeles. Later in life I was finally able to attend a private art school and then moved to Santa Fe. Here I am attending art classes at the Santa Fe Community College and study with private teachers.