What would it mean to see another person so completely that something in you shifted?I call that experience Radical Compassion - and it is what my paintings are reaching toward.
Radical Compassion is a way of seeing. It begins in the willingness to stop and look at another human being long enough that their particularity, the weight of their specific life, becomes undeniable. When that seeing truly happens, the boundary between self and other becomes briefly porous. In that openness is an antidote to the forces that make strangers of us: prejudice, indifference, the slow habituation by which we stop registering the humanity of those who seem unlike us.
My paintings live at the juncture of myth and social realism - drawing on photographs from European WWII archives to reimagine girls and women murdered in the Holocaust into worlds of beauty and infinite possibility. Each canvas is an act of restoration, each face an invitation into the sudden cellular recognition that their humanity and yours are made of the same material - the same limitless capacity for dreaming, the same unchartered potential, the same irreducible light.
Harnessing both my personal lineage and my inner language of symbols and imagery, I strive for this work to hold beauty and haunting in equal measure; beckoning the viewer toward a story that never got to unfold. My goal is to honor these lost lives; to give back something that was stolen, and remind the world that these young people once lived and loved, and had stories to tell. It asks nothing except to see - to witness the particular, the individual, the irreplaceable. It is an invitation to experience Radical Compassion. And it is available to everyone who stands before these paintings.

MIRJAM KALDERON

Mirjam Kalderon was born in Bitolj, Yugoslavia in 1929. Prior to WWII she lived in Bitolj, Yugoslavia.

Mirjam was murdered in the Holocaust.

RUTH TOBIAS

Berlijn, 11 December 1928 -
Sobibor, 23 July 1943
Reached the age of 14 years.

DAISY LOWOSITZOVÁ

Born 02.04.1930

Address/place of registration: Prague X, Přerovská 8
Transport Cv, no. 607 (06. 03. 1943, -> )
Transport Et, no. 1355 (23. 10. 1944, -> Auschwitz) Murdered

LILIANE PAULETTE BUSCHEL

BIRTH - 22 Apr 1932
Antwerp (Antwerpen), Belgium DEATH - 30 Sep 1943 (aged 11)
Auschwitz Concentration Camp

HANA JUNGOVA

Born 02.07.1929,
Prague
Transport Ck, nr. 339 (December 22, 1942, Prague -> Theresienstadt) Transport Er, no. 846 (10/16/1944, Theresienstadt -> Auschwitz) Murdered

FLOWER CROWN

The black and white image of this anonymous girl was taken by Henryk Ross in the Lodz Ghetto.

Ross risked his life taking photos that documented life there before the ghetto was liquidated and its residents were exrerminated in the death camps.

Emmy Stein

This portrait of Emmy Stein was commissioned by a school in the town of Seligenstadt, Germany that is named for her.

Despite her family’s efforts to flee the country, they were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp where Emmy was murdered on September 30, 1942. She was seven years old.