Ethan has been privileged to enjoy an international career spanning 40 years as a singer and actor performing leading roles in Musical Theater on many of the World’s great stag-es. After university studies at Yale in the USA where he was born and raised, he came to Europe in 1982 to continue his studies in Opera in Vienna and eventually began his career with an emphasis on dramatic character roles in Musicals such as The Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, Cats, Elisabeth, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Jekyll and Hyde, Disney’s Aladdin and many others.
An early interest in painting and visual arts was sacrificed to the intensity of the preparations for a career on the stage. In the last years, however, Ethan has returned to painting with a renewed interest and is discovering new ways of fulfilling that which he has always seen as his personal, archetypical role as an artist: A Teller of stories of the human condition- To create images that contain magic and spark moods and memories in the viewer and that vary from the mysterious and profound to the amusing and silly.
“I have been very fortunate to play a huge variety of characters and sing many different styles of music, from Classic to Rock to Jazz and New Age. I have tried to carry this sense of variety and flexibility into my painting and seek to create abstract images or objective ones as I wish, without being tied to a formal, technical ideal or ideology. This is one of the big advantages of exploring an art-form and striving for creativity later in life!
I am generally, but not exclusively, attracted to strong colors and varied textures. I allow myself to see each painting as akin to a jazz improvisation with the picture often taking form or changing form in mid- flight. I feel this leads to a deeper plumbing of the subconscious and, hopefully, beautiful, thought-provoking images. Singing someone else’s music demands a great deal of control on all levels and devotion to the composer’s and writer’s intentions. Painting gives me a chance to get to the root of the creative process with per-haps even more freedom.
Ethan has previously displayed and sold his work as part of the KUNST.HAFEN.WALLE exhibition in Bremen, Germany in 2019.