Born and raised in Vienna, Austria, I was educated to be a textile engineer. Then I discovered silk painting and taught myself how to make garments from the fabrics I painted. After I immigrated to Los Angeles in the late 80s, my fashion designs of upcycled and hand dyed dresses and my boutique in Los Felix turned into a 90s celebrity following. As creative director for Bebe in 2000 and later for Sharagano and Monahmour, I was faced with the destructive and ugly reality of mass production while working in China and India. I left the fashion industry and started to write for the LA-Weekly and a few literary anthologies and learned illustration.
Remembering why I fell in love with art in the first place, I moved to Santa Fe in 2019, where I now show and sell my fashion-paintings and one of a kind upcycled dresses at the Artisan Market at the Railyard every Sunday
Artist Statement
Dressed in diaphanous barely there dresses of my own design, my impossibly long legged fairies live in tropical greenhouses with pet-mice under lush and brightly colored plants. Growing up in Vienna, I took art for granted. From posters by the Phantastic Realist Viennese Painters and Hundertwasser-Houses to richly ornamented Art Nouveau subway stations by Klimt, art was no big deal. Now I know that it is this abundance of beauty that has fed my inspiration ever since, through an exciting carrier in fashion in Los Angeles and now as an artist in Santa Fe.
I start out with traditional watercolor, mostly on primed wood, but to get the intensity of colors and to achieve the details I want, I have to follow up with many more layers. I always use colored pencils and alcohol markers and sometimes water soluble crayons as well. To keep it all there, I spray it with UV protecting polyurethane lacquer.
Painting is my spa-trip for the soul. I escape into the world of my ethereal, unreasonably beautiful creations, unbound from gravity, tragedy, pandemics and death. My fairies don’t age, diet, argue or worry and why should they? They only know vibrantly healthy plants, still untouched by environmental destruction, low-and slow flying birds and friendly mice. Sooner or later, they’ll get bored and will need a challenge. But for now, the world I paint is spinning nicely, still calm without a squeak.
