[Firstname]
[Lastname] straum_art

I came to painting late — in my mid-fifties, after a career in engineering and a life in sport. What I had was thirty-five years of accumulated things worth saying and, finally, the language to say them.

I paint in oil, in the tradition of Northern European figurative painting. I work with chiaroscuro — light emerging from darkness — as both a technical discipline and a symbolic language. My subjects are people I know, situations I cannot look away from, and objects that carry more weight than their surfaces suggest.

My work is not decorative. Every painting has a thesis.