His talent for painting was discovered at an early age. As a result, in his teens, he was able to embark on an apprenticeship with the noted Flemish painter Otto Van’t Sant.

Despite the many distractions in his early adulthood; writing Beat poetry in the 1950’s, fomenting revolution as a left wing radical in the 1960’s and flirting with large scale steel structure in the 1970’s, a mature and personal style of painting eventually emerged. Subtlety, stark imagery, earthy colors, and distressed paint surfaces began to mark his work and continue to this day.

On the meaning of individual works of art he is silent, saying only, “We are all, in an existential sense, alone, but we can find purity and beauty and even enrichment in that aloneness no matter how bleak or desolate it may seem.”

Mr. Emmerich divides his time between his winter studio in Bandung, Indonesia and his summer home near Amsterdam.