Ancestral Stories

This was the beginning of a series in which the characters came back to life, even those who had died long ago. It expresses the connection between present and past. It was also the beginning of the inclusion of words on the canvas, shaping thoughts.

Whether painting or writing about a character, it is necessary to know him or her in depth and even inhabit the subject’s life. A lot of protagonists appear in this series, most of them have already died. In the shape they take, the present and the absent become one, thus creating what I call a “magic existence.”

This is the first painting where I ventured into a world of memories. When I started it, I didn’t know why I was creating it. In fact, it didn’t seem to make much sense to try to catch the essence of those four siblings. I was definitely captured by the beauty of each one of them and by the story described below.

Although the Second World War officially started in 1939, the persecution started many years before. These four siblings, one of whom is my mother, went to school in a village in northern Germany called Marienhafe, near the border of Holland. A law was instituted to demonstrate how the Jews did not fulfill the pure Aryan ideals. Hence, an anthropometric study was carried out at the school. They measured the head, nose, ears, height, and color of eyes, hair, and skin, etc. The day came that they proudly announced that there was a family in that school whose features coincided exactly with the pure Aryan features that they believed expressed the beauty of its people. To everyone’s shock, they found that it was these four siblings. Needless to say, the school authorities stopped the assembly, whispering that the children were Jewish. So everyone was told to go back to their classrooms, the record was closed, and that was the end of it.

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Ancestral Stories

This was the beginning of a series in which the characters came back to life, even those who had died long ago. It expresses the connection between present and past. It was also the beginning of the inclusion of words on the canvas, shaping thoughts.

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