I was born 1947 in the Black Forest, Southern Germany. My parents, Ingrid and Siegfried Haas, had married the year before. My father had returned home from having been incarcerated for two years in a French internment camp. Our young family lived in a small half-timbered hut surrounded by forest and pastures and I remember the sound of cowbells and the chatter of geese outside our small one-bedroom home. 

 My artist father earned a living by painting religious tableaux for the farmers and churches in the surrounding areas. Watching him in his plein air art studio developing large scale scenes for the, "stations of the cross," impressed me deeply and I determined then that I would become a painter too. 

 As I grew up my father often allowed me to accompany him to the job sites where he would paint frescoes, install stained glass windows or create the sgraffitto of a pastoral idyll on the wall of a farmhouse, and in time, I became his little helper, bit by bit picking up tricks of the artist trade. It was very hands-on all the way through my teenage years.

 The family grew, we moved a few times, and after completing high school, I enrolled at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (HfBK) in Berlin.

 The wounds inflicted on the city by WW2 were visible everywhere. The cold War was raging and kept the traumatized city split in two by the Berlin wall in a permanent state of alarm. Simultaneously, the ongoing anti-Vietnam protests created an atmosphere so volatile that most of the professors at my school opted to not show up to teach. Although it was near impossible to not be swept up in the ongoing protests, I needed to be creative, and together with a brother and a few friends, started a small publishing house for children's books becoming its art director and illustrator.

 A mutual friend at the art school introduced me to Emily Tracy, an exquisitely beautiful and talented opera singer from faraway Texas. We fell madly in love, married and moved to Los Angeles. There, in 1976, our son Lukas was born.  During that period I worked as a handyman, truck driver, illustrator for various publications, ( LA Times, New West Magazine, LA Weekly), studio assistant, occasional instructor at Otis-Parsons and together with my wife as a stage parent to Lukas who showed an irrepressible obsession with wanting to, "be in the movies." 

 Our twin boys, Nikoli and Simon,  who would later emerge as art makers, the Haas brothers, were born in 1984. We moved to Austin, Texas where I established a company designing and implementing large scale public projects, (landscapes, parks, fountains, grottos, sculptures), creating bespoke furniture and styling refined homes with window surrounds, fanciful fountains and fireplaces I carved from limestone. And although there was so much going on,(my wife had become a very busy and sought-after TV writer), I faithfully painted as often as possible.

 Once our sons had graduated from school, they moved to Los Angeles and my wife and I joined them there in 2014. I took on a string of complex large scale projects, designing and building, a state-of-the-art music studio, a 4.5 acre bird sanctuary, several landscapes, fountains and an elegant private residence. These projects are now complete.

 And so I am again an alchemist of paint, color, form, a gatherer of visual impulses, a teller of stories about what happens when I put my brush to paper or canvas to peel away the layers of hesitation and doubt obscuring my essence.  

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 ​ And here is my work.

 Enjoy!

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 December 16, 2025

 bh

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