#155 Secret Garden Painting

About the artist. (born 1937, Ambon, Indonesia, son of Dutch military officer.) What can I tell you about myself? I have wandered this earth for the last 82 years; struggling through wars, concentration camps, airplane failures. A university-trained mechanical-design engineer, I founded several companies, some of which still utilize the cutting edge technology I developed. Besides painting, sculpting is also a means of expression. In my front yard stands an eleven-foot-tall sculpture containing 20 fired clay tablets showing the peoples of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus. Cultures, which created regional hospitals, libraries, mandatory education, hydroponic agriculture, more than a thousand years before the western world discovered that the street was not the only place to empty their night pots. In other words, there were people who were not rapists, murderers and gangsters as we are made to believe. I have also written a number of books of my experiences in the WWII Japanese concentration camps on Java. Stories written from the point of view of a child prisoner. Art has always been my love. When my world seemed upside down, my heart caught in a shredder, there always was a museum somewhere, a chance to get a glimpse into the minds of other artists, struggling to survive within a confused world. I have always felt, that he who creates that which never was, holds the hand of his creator. This is the most wonderful feeling one will ever experience. Art is all about feelings. The ability to make the viewer experience feelings which enrich life. I better stop here. There is still so much to do and so little time in which to do it in. My belief in life and art is simple: I'd rather live in peril while being free, than live safe and secure while being enslaved.