I am a London based painter, born in Germany where I grew up during post-war times. I came to England on a scholarship in 1976 and have lived in London ever since.
At the age of nine I decided that I wanted to be an artist and in 1971 I began to study fine art at the Städelschule, Academy of Fine Art, Frankfurt which was at a time of anarchy in colleges following the student unrest of the late sixties. Against all trends I immediately knew that I wanted to find a new way of painting.

My paintings try to visualize aspects of humanness and existence, to express emotion,- they search in a deeply personal way for fundamental common denominators in all of us. They document a lifelong journey of exploring the question of being alive at this time and in this society.
When I conceive a painting I start by isolating moments of observation, I select instances, faces, gestures that seem to contain something intangible but feel generally applicable, I then translate them into an image that resonates my very personal perceptions.

Initially for almost a decade I worked exclusively from imagination without using any kind of reference material. I have always been guided by my instincts rather than working to a formula. My principal goal from the start has been to achieve intensity, to be compelling, aspiring to what I had admired in artists like Van Eyck, Vermeer and Georges de La Tour.
I started in 1971 by practising the old master technique of layering egg tempera and oil glazes, then gradually over the years took this principle to the extreme by using colour pigments mixed with acrylic mediums instead of egg tempera.

Everything I want to say with my work is expressed through the way I physically build the painting once I have decided on an image and formed a clear vision of it in my head: I apply countless layers to build up a predominantly translucent body of paint which sits almost object-like on the canvas. The surface appearance across a painting can vary greatly and is usually very complex and linked to individual elements within the composition. Any specific surface treatment assigns levels of importance and focus to a particular part of an image. Thickness can range from watercolour-thin to 15mm thick, smooth or textured, at times aggressively rough,- these are all feature that are difficult to identify in online images. Colour is of great importance, it carries symbolic and expressive meaning. I achieve tonal subtleties through the way I apply, juxtapose and layer paint, shadows and light refection also play an important part.

The human image is always at the centre, it is the foundation that acts as the carrier of my painterly language and guides the viewer towards reading the content that lies below the surface.
The ultimate aim that runs through everything is to arrive at an image that conveys stillness, rests in itself, that draws you in and causes you to reflect.

My paintings could be seen as figuration closely combined with abstract considerations. I express myself through colour, figurative form and particularly through associations evoked by the surface. There is a distinct conceptual factor in the way I separate sections within a painting, using different languages and giving them their own identity, the most attention however is given to my faces and skin and body.

I have no interest in being narrative or descriptive, I offer an interpretation of what I am depicting and hope for the recipient to form their own associations.
Despite their large scale, I would like my paintings to be experienced at close proximity, I would like the viewer to be enveloped by them and become absorbed by their intensity.

DETAIL & STUDIO IMAGES

Awards and spent a few days and some late nights meeting rap, R&B and kuduro superstars from across Africa: names like Banky W, Fally Ipupa, Daddy Owen, Cabo Snoop and Radio & Weasel, from Angola to Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo and beyond, all huge stars in their own countries, selling truckloads of records despite rampant piracy and a rickety music industry. These guys are kind of the Jay Zs and Snoops of Africa, basically.

Fear - Trilogy  2019, 200cm x 600cm  Acrylic Medium + Pigment on Canvas

See link above for a slideshow and explanation of this triptych