On the day of his 50th birthday, Carl and sixty others, engineers and employees of Grumman Space serving NASA as contractor on the Space Station project, were laid off. While fifty-nine of them were desperately looking for another job, Carl started painting. Guided by the advice of his ‘spiritual mentor’, Vincent van Gogh, Carl used this unfortunate situation as an opportunity to pursue his life-long dream. Two years later, he presented to the public 52 large canvasses in a solo exhibition at the Ivanova Gallery in the gallery district of Houston. On the opening night, two thousand people came to see his art.
Fascinated by Vincent’s technique and colors, Carl developed not just his own style but also a proprietary technique how to mix his own acrylic paints from industrial material. His affection was not strictly for liquid though – but also for fluorescent chalk, used in numerous large-scale portraits that are in private collections around the world. Although Carl enjoys looking at watercolors or oils, these do not suit his personality: watercolors are too weak for him and oils take too long to dry. Even book lovers can enjoy Carl’s art, selected by Marta as covers for her two intuition handbooks (see Marta’s Books page).
Enjoy a small selection of Carl’s work in the slide presentation or view these and some other paintings in the list below. We will replace the viewing selection periodically.
