 I was born in Gotha, Germany, two months after the start of World War II, my parents lived in the castle Schloss Friedenstein, high above the city. My earliest memories are of the elegant park surrounding the castle and the terrifying bombing raides of 1944/45. After the war, my mother fled with my two brothers and me to Steyr, Austria, where the family was reunited with my father, after he had been released from an American POW camp. As far back as I can remember, I made drawings and used whatever colors were available in the difficult years of Europe's recovery from the war. My formal art education began in 1954, when I enrolled in the Department of Graphic Design at the Bundesgewerbeschule in Linz, Austria. There I won my first competition for a poster—my first printed job. Four years of study prepared me for a career in advertising. After graduation in 1958, I moved to Vienna, working at an advertising agency and a graphic design studio. I also became very interested in music, especially the viola d’amore, a baroque string instrument of the viol family. I took classes at the Academy of Music, which culminated in a performance I gave of a Vivaldi concerto. The day after the concert (in April of 1959), our family moved to the United States. My father, an aerodynamic engineer, had designed airplanes in Gotha until he was drafted into the army in 1944. In post-WW II Austria, there was no demand for airplane designers, so he switched careers, and began developing electric-power dams, including ones in India, Iran, Greece and locally along the Danube river. In 1959 my father accepted a position with the Wernher von Braun Team in Huntsville, Alabama, where he eventually played a key role in the development of the Saturn V, the rocket that propelled Man to the moon. So my career in America began in Huntsville, a town that would soon grow rapidly, thanks to the space program. But New York offered better prospects for an artist in my field, so I moved there in the fall of 1959. With a secure job as graphic designer, I got married and started a family. After four years in New York, I moved back to Huntsville to work in the Space Museum at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. This project involved planning the overall interior of the museum as well as creating and finishing exhibits. With that accomplished, it was time to return to New York. After studying with Seymour Quast and James McMullan at the School of Visual Arts, I opened my own studio, Blumrich Illustration, in 1974. My work was published in New York Magazine, The New York Times, GQ, Fortune, in various trade publications, on book covers and on record jackets. I created posters for UNICEF and designed annual reports and company logos. In 1981 I accepted a position as information graphics specialist at Newsweek Magazine, a position I held for twenty-one years until 2002. At Newsweek, I transitioned from pens and brushes to the computer. Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and QuarkXPress became my new tools. I also taught an info graphics evening course at the New School in 1982/83. I continued doing freelance illustrations, which were represented by The Push Pin Group for a number of years. During this time I began working with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Magazin in Germany. This turned into a very fruitful collaboration for over 15 years, in which I mainly worked with well-known art director Hans-Georg Pospischil. Mr. Pospischil and I also collaborated on a number of projects for Hoechst Marion Roussel and Aventis. In the 1980s I began a secondary career as painter. At first I focused on landscapes of Long Island, New York, (where I live) always setting up my easel outdoors, never working from photographs; still lives and portraits I painted in the studio. Painting trips to California and Colorado followed. Now I travel regularly to Europe to paint in Italy, France, Germany and in Austria. I taught info graphics and painting workshops at the academy in Stuttgart, Germany and near Florence, Italy. Lately, I have taken up the viola d’amore again which had spent many years collecting dust while family, career and work demanded more hours than are in a day. |