Vita

How long have you been working as an artist?

For over 30 years.
Initially part-time,
during this time I had solo exhibitions in Bremen (2001), Lingen (2002) and Aurich (2011, 2021, 2022) and I could participate in a group exhibition in Verona (Italy) in 2001.

Until 2008 I was a member of the artists’ association GEDOK/ Bremen, after that I concentrated professionally on my management position at the higher municipal association “Ostfriesische Landschaft”.

Since 2021 I have dedicated myself exclusively to art.

When did your love for art begin?


Art is at my side throughout my whole life.
Already as a child I drew with passion on all kinds of surfaces and on whatever came into my hands.
A shoebox with sharpened crayons was my treasure box when I was five year old.


Later I was creative professionally, in various ways, fore example in translations from Dutch (Huub Oosterhuis), organizationally-conceptually in the management of further education of the Lower Saxony Ministry of Education and in concept development of specialist conferences in East Frisia and regional teaching material.


And the visual arts were a constant companion. For me, it always corresponds: art and poetry, art and music, art and theater, art and design….

Who were your artistic teachers?


They were many, all wonderful, inspiring people.

I met some of them at international summer academies in Hamburg or also in Norden/ Ostfriesland.

..for example, the painter Ralf-Rainer Odenwald, who was the first to give me an approach to informal painting in 1998,


or the multi-talented art professor Àlex Nogué (Spain). He taught the cross over of fields such as poetry and art, art and architecture, etc.
In 2001 he let us see links between “painting and space”.


From Estonia came the artist and artistic director of the Tartu Art Museum, Athie Seppet, who coached me in the summer weeks of 2000, 2002 and 2003 in the development of small sculptures from found objects from the coast and trained me in minimalism.

In 2005, the artist Yolanda Tabanera (Spain) worked in an interdisciplinary way, combining “painting, drawing and object” in her summer workshop, which lasted several weeks.

The successful illustrators Larissa Bertonasco and Jutta Bauer were my teachers in drawing and collage in 2018 and 2021.


I have made study trips to Veneto (Italy) and to New Jersey (USA), where I have contacts with artists and dear friends.

((This page is dedicated to my friend Fred Cole who died in 2022))

Which visual artists inspire you?

There are many… My sounding board is definitely abstract expressionism in the U.S. after World War II.

In painting it is the great Marc Rothko, whose work I saw in the original in the U.S., Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Joan Mitchell and William de Kooning,
and the German Emil Schumacher. I love the former international group COBRA.
With collages, I think of the great works of Henri Matisse, but also Asger Jorn.
Drawing: I admire the characteristic, humorous and loose stroke of illustrator Felix Scheinberger.

And at the moment? Contemporary American artist as Terri Froehlich and Marc Eanes are immensely stimulating to my work.