Islamic fundamentalism and its use
of terrorism would come to gravely
undermine an international commu-
nity’s hope for a peace dividend in a
Post Cold War Era.
Springtime in Paris
It was then I began to fundamentally
question the efficacy of the worldview
that international competition could
result in international peace. I slowly
began accepting the grave error in that
rationale. After graduation, I accepted
a consulting assignment in Paris, but
became increasingly agitated by what
I perceived to be my participation in a
worldview that I no longer adhered to.
It was, then, in the Parisian springtime
that I came to a crossroads.
I was living in the hallowed artist
quarter of Montmartre, right at the
base of Basilique du Sacré-Cœur. I vis-
ited museums and galleries, attended
concerts in the city’s cathedrals, and
let the words of writers, poets, and
existentialist philosophers revive a
creative quickening in me that I had
lost since childhood. I decided to quit
my job and move to California to align
my actions with my inner passion. I
became an artist.
For years I immersed myself
in the joy and personal peace of
landscape oil painting and running
my own gallery on Balboa Island in
Newport Beach, California. Always,
however, the unrest in the world
haunted me as it does all of us in some
manner or another. Clearly my expe-
riences abroad had tuned my personal
antenna to be sensitive to conflict
and threats to peace in distant places.
More psychologically significant,
though, was my family history.
Silent Night he granted me as an amateur, sixth-
grade journalist. For five nights he
Both of my parents had grown up as
poor subsistence farmers in a bucolic
hamlet in Luxembourg. During World
War II, my father was imprisoned
by the Nazis and eventually sent to a
concentration camp. He was not Jew-
ish, homosexual, handicapped, politi-
cally dangerous, or any of the things
Hitler did not tolerate. In fact, he was
a seventeen-year old, Roman Catholic
farm boy walking home from Christ-
mas Eve mass. The Germans suspected
someone in the town of working with
the resistance movement, but did not
know whom. Ten men were seized as
reprisals and my innocent father was
caught in the roundup. recounted everything he could recall
about those dark times in the camps.
Those discussions resonate with me to
this day. They continue to inform my
perspective on the innate good and
bad seeds in each of us, and the waters
that cause the respective seeds to
germinate and ultimately grow. In his
own loving way, my father was being
a great peacemaker.
My father was sent to prison and
scheduled for execution. That Christ-
mas Eve night he stood in crowded
prison cell and listened to a lone,
drunken German soldier in the dis-
tance sing Stille Nacht, Silent Night—
the lyrics “sleep in heavenly peace”
piercing the night and reverberating
within the icy cell. By a strange twist
of fate, he would not be executed, but
was sent to a labor camp instead. He
endured unspeakable horrors. Rather
amazingly, he escaped and survived a
myriad of illnesses and malnutrition.
He then worked for nine years to earn
enough money to immigrate to the
United States. He came with nothing
but the unbridled conviction to seek
peace and opportunity for himself and
his future family.
I have always had an enormous
amount of respect for my father and
gratitude for the loving sacrifices
he made before his passing in 1995.
Ultimately, one of his greatest gifts
to me was the series of interviews
Bending the Arc
Seven years after leaving the business
world, on that fateful September 11th,
I stood aghast in my apartment in
beautiful Newport Beach, California,
as I watched on television the towers
collapse. The world was in a mess and
it did not seem like there were any
voices with answers. As my years of
landscape painting proceeded, a long
simmering inspiration to artistically
express my gratitude for the voices in
the wilderness that did have answers
began to effervesce. In January 2012, I
began creating a collection of oil paint-
ings depicting great peacemakers. The
goal was to study and present those
who have changed the world through
peaceful efforts, those who coura-
geously spoke up, stood up, and lit the
lamp of hope.
I began researching each figure
substantially so as to find inspiration
for compositions depicting them. I also
began videotaping the paintings as I
worked on them and writing about
the achievements of these luminaries.
I began to notice the influences many
of the peacemakers had on each other.
Martin Luther King, Jr. once famously
stated, “The arc of the moral universe
IMAGINE
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