With this continuing series I am using the Berlin Wall as metaphor for all of the walls in my life.
I was born behind the wall in 1962’s West-Berlin, in close proximity to the actual wall, spent my formative years there among a people that in general were very reserved. Within my own family there were walls built up and torn down which shouldn’t have. I realized walls were a major theme running through my life.  Making the resulting very personal paintings public was one way of my breaking down an internal wall I had built up myself. All my life I had erected my own walls of protection and fears but since moving to the wide open spaces of the American Southwest many years ago I had been learning to tear them down.
The paintings examine the endless contradiction and effects of walls.  Walls are real and physical, imagined and psychological. They make visible one’s fears, anxieties and insecurities. They separate and yet offer a common purpose. They divide us yet invite us to scale them and tear them down, to come together again. They offer comfort, though false, yet feed hate and fear. They isolate and protect. Walls keep people out AND in. They shelter us and yet make us want to break free. They repel and tempt. They control and we rebel. They are a prison and a freedom. We can choose to erect them or tear them down. 
Still living in the US and seeing all the new talk about building walls by the shocking new president, this series has taken on a special meaning and received much attention here recently. "In Search Of Peace" has been exhibited in several political themed shows In California as well as at the Kimmel Galleries at NY University and is included in a catalogue along with a personal letter to the President which is being sent to the White House.
I hope to one day exhibit this series in Berlin.



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Wende/Transformation