Artist's Statement

My paintings yearn to express the glaring dichotomy between the horror of the Holocaust and the fantasies of Hollywood, which for many years turned its eyes away from the greatest atrocity of the 20th century.

I began quite innocently with an exploration of a popular cartoon character, Betty Boop. I saw in her eyes, ever turned-up-and-away, the part of us that wants to deny what is actually taking place on a personal, social, and global level. It wasn’t until I painted her under a fiery red sky that I suddenly knew I was entering the world of the Holocaust—a horrific time personally—which I had previously found too terrifying to explore in my painting.

In 2013, with the publication of Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration, Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler, I read about how movies horrendously ignored the Holocaust, instead, captivating me and the recovering world with the glamour, fantasy and romance of blockbusters like Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. Even after General Eisenhower ordered filming of the death camps to document the machinery that systematically murdered millions, there was little response by the American film industry. The silence lasted decades, with only a trickle of films hinting at the reality of the savagery.

My work confronts the Hollywood of that time, when Europe and most of the world abandoned Jews, gays, and other victims of the camps. My visual exploration of the conflict between what was happening and what was portrayed culminated with the painting Denial, a triptych of an Auschwitz landscape. This painting opened the door to further expressions of the Holocaust through the juxtaposition of fantasy and reality using motifs and actors from popular films of that time.

By focusing attention on how the world turned away from the Holocaust, and how we continue to turn our eyes away from global suffering, I counter our collective indifference to inhumanity through my art. My greatest hope is to contribute to a dialogue that cultivates healing.