Gerda Cohen: always an artist

Dreaming

It was a friend of my grandmother who spotted my mother's artistic talent when she was a teenager. After encouragement, she attended Cardiff School of Art, and a world opened up to her. For six decades Gerda painted and sculpted, a sketchbook always at hand, and her work was influenced by many of the movements of the twentieth century, and touched many people. A show of her paintings in the sixties, expressing the horors of the Biafran war, the fears of an atomic war, and her own inner turmoil, was so successful that every painting sold. Gerda was fortunate to have escaped from Vienna, Austria in 1938, but was unfortunate to have been a Jew living in Vienna during Kristallnacht. Her father was taken to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and survived the war there. At the end of the war Gerda and her mother were united with her father in Cardiff.

This background is so important, because art, mainly painting, became a deep therapy for Gerda, a safe way of going deep inside her unconscious mind.

These paintings were done in the early eighties when Gerda was living in the Cotswolds in Southwest England.

In the woods

Outer Space

Riding the horse backwards

The Birds

Gerda now lives in New Zealand. She has not been able to paint for some years, since a stroke has left her bedridden, but she is surrounded by her silk paintings in her own bedroom.