Hope and Despair

The Anne Frank Series of paintings was inspired by my response to Anne Frank's Diary and by a visit to the house in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis during World War Two. Through the depiction of Anne's "inner life" - her feelings and thoughts, and her external circumstances, constituted by the physical reality of the camp, the paintings strive to capture the opposition between hope and despair.

This opposition is the dynamism which forces the collective memory's responsibility to the present and future. It can do this because there exists a past whose tragedy is internalized through remembrance. In this sense my paintings constitute a form of "narrative painting". As such these paintings expressionistically represent the temporal experiences of human consciousness through the forms of "memory", "anticipation", "despair", "fear" and "hope".

Hidden Hopes

Green Anne Frank

Red Sky One

Red Sky Two