Gate Birkenau Painting

born in 1964 in Hamburg,freelance artist since 1993,lives in Waiblingen / StuttgartJan F. Welker lives as a freelance artist in Waiblingen in the South of Germany. His studio in an old Neustadt farmhouse with an unspoilt garden lies high above the meandering river Rems in the shadow of the village church.His permanent exhibition can be found here. Gallery, workshop and studio spread over three floors.Jan F. Welker was born into a clerical family, is married with three daughters and used to live in North Hessia and in Schleswig - Holstein where he attended a grammar school, the Domschule Schleswig. A joiners apprenticeship followed suit. Instead of national service he chose to work with mentally handicapped, which had a great impact on his later works. Since then he struggles with various ways of expressing mans fragile shape to release the constant tension between matter and spirituality, between mortality and immortality.Welker began his career training as conservationist with Bernd Gisevius in Clausthal-Zellerfeld. It was here that the technological basis for his becoming a painter was laid.Nude painting, drawing studies and early representational pictures were the starting points.In consequence he developed a very intensive discourse in which he tried to adapt modern and traditional elements in painting.Journeys to Paris and Vienna extend his visions.Since 1993 Jan F. Welker is a freelance artist with an extraordinary broad basis in stylistic means and forms.The central core of his works cannot simply be recognized by his techniques in painting but by his concentration on continuous variations of fundamental themes and motifs: man, nature, time and mortality, present moments and eternity, the human existence in all its endangered being, the exciting vicinity of salvation and condemnation, of hope and threat.To reveal the fundamental questions of our human existence Welker does not only employ his capacity as a painter but also various other kinds of art, as there are: music, poetry and fiction, philosophy and scripture.His paintings can be found in private and public homes due to regular exhibitions in North Hessia and the greater Stuttgart area.Welkers gallery in Waiblingen has become an attraction by a permanent exhibition, his atelier constantly open to the public and because he offers seminars and open-air exhibitions in the picturesque vicinity of his farmhouse studio.