Although this is primarily a blog about Georg's memoir, in life he was inseparable from all that he did. He was a painter of oils and watercolors, a print maker, a sculptor, an inventor with a number of European and U.S. patents -and a writer. He considered himself an expressionist, since what he painted originated from within, from his feelings of joy, fun, anger, sadness. Often he didn't know himself what his paintings symbolized, since he wasn't given to analyzing or philosophizing about his art. "I'd rather paint than talk about painting."
After ten years of painting sad men or masked harlequins, Georg first acknowledged that all of this was an unconscious effort to cleanse himself of all that had taken place in the war, of his guilt and pain. And this brings us back to the book. What happened from the ages of 18 to 21 in Russia, as a foot soldier, in the trenches and as a Russian prisoner was to ionfluence his art, in one way or another for the next 50 years.
Ergo, I've decided to add news about Georg's art to this blog. The first major showing after his death in 2006, was a collective homage at the Centro Cultural Gonzales Gallo in Chapala. Locally this lovely 19th century building, now museum and cultural center, is better known as the old train station. After the exhibition I learned that this state museum did not yet have a permanent collection, so I gifted them with paintings and drawings from when we first arrived in Mexico, in the late sixties. There is now a special Georg Rauch room at the museum where visitors may visit this collection. Below are a painting and a drawing from the Chapala museum. Both of these were lovingly repaired by Sarahi, a local expert in art restoration
