The Hollywood of my early childhood still shone in a pre-polluted light, strangely defiant of the war news that filtered into our awareness. The war raged on until I was seven; over there, of course.

When I was thirteen, my family moved north of the city, to a lifeless hamlet bound and gagged by the wash ‘n wear fabric that was the American 50s. It was then, sitting alone at a huge linoleum-topped table in my school library, that I studied the photographic documentation of the German death factories. I stared at the massed mounds of dead. I searched their faces. They disintegrated into patterns while surrounding posts, windows and stones remained intact, symbolic monuments to the lost lives. Incredulous and inadequate, unable to absorb the implication of those shocking images, I imagined myself to be among the victims: captive, escaping, conspiring, even collaborating in order to survive.

Only years later did I realize why my identification with the victims was incomplete. I was not there, and it laid a ground of guilt that would shape my perception and direct my conduct. Reluctantly, I had to accept the dilemma of the observer, my sense of isolation reinforced by the narrow perspective of an illiberal community. The Holocaust necessarily became the tableau against which I projected my own life. Yet I was constrained from painting it, as though there was profanity in any attempt to transform the catastrophe into an aesthetic.

By another yardstick, the task appeared to be the reconciliation of the future to its past. I would ask you to imagine standing at the center of a narrow foot-bridge. One end of the bridge denotes the past while the other denotes the future. Neither end is discernible and you are unclear as to which is which. Yet you are extraordinary alert: you sense certain shapes and colors and time moving at an unfamiliar pace. You try to place these things into a logical relationship, but you cannot. You realize that logic is insufficient as a means of making sense of the experience – this place. You look inwards, as though dreaming. You notice at your feet the raw materials of the artist. You instantly and intuitively understand some of the ways in which you can use these materials and quite naturally you begin painting. Your need is to give form to your experience of standing at the center of the foot-bridge. Yet you know that as the images reveal themselves their meaning recedes. They will not release their mystery. But, to your surprise, in those shadows a form appears. Could it be yourself?

Through Freud I had seen the self defined as paramount. Had not the Nazis (and others) subordinated the self to the Volk or the masses or the media, and thrust the world into despair? Driven by a sense of responsibility to sustain the individual, I began to work.