In 1988 my wife and I both had a six month sabbatical, which we spent in Paris. During that time I began to feel I was welding my childhood with my adulthood. I began seriously working on incorporating my personal story in my art. I didn’t have a studio so I had to work in the living room of our apartment. I did a series of drawings, exploring the various ways I could approach the subject of my experience as a hidden Jewish child during World War II in France.
Before we left for Paris an artist friend of mine gave me the book “Paris Graffiti” by Joerg Huber, a photo survey of stencil graffiti in Paris. I immediately thought that this would be the way I would tell my story, by using that technique. The metaphor I would use for my art would be Paris graffitied walls.
When I came back to the U.S. in 1989 and started painting in my studio, I began exploring this idea by doing a series of paintings that became the preliminary work for my Liberation of Paris Murals.
