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Having met while they were both art students in Germany, my parents spent most of their married life collaborating as a team to create liturgical art, completing over 100 projects in the US alone, whereby during their last years they focused primarily on creating art for churches belonging to the Byzantine Rite, such as the well-known church of St. Mary's in New York City (at the corner of 2nd Ave and 15th Street), a rather stunning piece of 1960's architecture by Br. Cajetan Baumann, OFM. As my parents always told me, theirs was an ideal partnership, with my father contributing his astounding sense of color and my mother her skill in providing the graphic details. One of their last major collaborative efforts was the art work in the Church of St. Thomas the Apostle, in Rahway, NJ. (To view individual images, click on a cross on the map that is displayed.)
However, my mother was also quite accomplished as a portrait artist in her own right, and in fact earned her living after the war painting portraits of officers and family members belonging to the occupying forces in Berlin. She also continued this work when we first arrived in the US, only abandoning it in order to be able to provide me with a more stable home -- undoubtedly quite a sacrifice for her. In later life, she also became highly skilled as the creator of large tapestry wall hangings, both for churches and secular spaces, as the example below shows. |
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