The beginning

So how do you start a blog? At the beginning I guess. That's what I looked like when I was a very young artist at 5 month and 11 month.

About me

I’m an Afro-German woman that hails from a family of escape artists. My father fled the bloody Zanzibar Revolution to live in Erfurt, East Germany where he met my mother. When I was born, my family abandoned their lives behind the Iron Curtain to resettle in Frankfurt, West Germany. And later, following in my parents’ fugitive footsteps, I escaped my severe depression through my pursuit of art.

In my teens, I immersed myself in painting, pottery, bookmaking, sewing, etching, photography and papermaking. As a young adult living in Germany, I worked closely with the color and wall-surface expert Martina Löw and learn the art of screen-printing. I also interned in the art departments of an advertising agency and apprenticed with a goldsmith. 

I have always been drawn to books, movies and music that mad me want to laugh or cry or dance. Their lingering impressions remind me of who I am and from where I’ve come. I create art for a similar purpose—to tell stories that make powerful emotional connections with the viewer.

While overcoming depression as a teen and young adult, I learned to tune in to my turbulent emotions and channel their messages into my art. Encountering the deepest lows and the highest highs has been a powerful gift in helping me authentically capture the spectrum of human emotions in my work. I use color and light to capture a specific mood, and paint with brushes, palette-knifes, and my hands and fingers to form my own unique aesthetic. The backgrounds of my acrylic and oil paintings are often inspired by patterns and textures that I find in nature. As you take a closer look you’ll discover a million little details that are unique to each piece.

Ten years ago, I began to explore the profound effects that images in the media—from advertisements to celebrity photos in tabloid magazines—have on our emotions. But rather than choose familiar subjects, I cast unknown figures in my paintings. Their stark anonymity served as a catalyst for translating the raw feelings they evoked in me onto the canvas. More recently, I have been experimenting with painting people I know. This gives me more freedom with the composition and makes their emotional undercurrent more personal. For the viewer, each multi-layered, large-scale image encourages—and even demands—pure reactions, free from expectations and prescribed sentimentality.

These day I consider myself very lucky to be an artist and an international mom to my to young bilingual sons. Sending them to Play Mountain Place a progressive alternative humanistic school with a main focus on emotional intelligence and conflict resolution, goes hand in hand with the way the way I feel about my art.