Actually I painted landscapes always in between my other parts of work mostly as memories, what I had seen on my travels through Europe. Over the years I made a “Diary of a Nightmare” using photos I had taken for drawings of colored pencil on black paper and acrylic white to give the motive more precision if necessary. The black paper gave these little works the appearance of being a bit blurred like memories and I made them only for myself and showed them to nobody else.

This changed when I came to America and especially to Milwaukee. I will never forget the first time, when my wife showed me the bluffs at Cudahy surprisingly rising from the wide Michigan Lake. That was my landscape! I was grown up at the eastern part of Schleswig-Holstein / Germany and here I found the same glacial forms as at home. Both landscapes were formed by glaciers at the same time.

I needed some years until I found a way to deal with this kind of landscape. The deciding thing was perhaps, that I had no car and experienced this landscape daily by foot with my dog. This way I saw the woods more from inside than from outside. Big skies and wide horizons were not so important as how trees stood to each other and the role the undergrowth played and the creeks, the ravines, which are decisive, but not seen from the outside.