Known as the red-faced “German painter” in Chiang Mai, Gerd Barkowsky had a sparkling personality. Often being met in the well-known Daret Restaurant near Chiang Mai’ s Tha Pae Gate in the early 1980s, Gerd enjoyed the company of Arthur, a Dutch national married to an aristocratic lady, and Swiss Theo Meier, an outspoken artist of life, earning money as painter as Gerd himself. It was business as usual to see them holding their favourite glasses of “Mae Khong” that they were already drinking in the late afternoons sitting around a small wooden table.

When I met Gerd at Daret’s in early 1882, he told me that he was already living some 25 years in Chiang Mai and had married a nice lady taking care of his daily escapades. He has left Germany in 1950, just five years after the Second World War that has devastated most of the German cities.

Actually, born on 26 April 1926 at the East Prussian port city of Koenigsberg, today’s Kaliningrad in the Soviet Union, Gerd’s childhood was a happy one until the outbreak of war. Already selling his first water colour paintings as a schoolboy in his hometown and other Baltic resort-towns, Gerd had to join the military service in Hitler’s Germany as “Panzer Grenadier” and fight at the Eastern Front. After the war, he managed to study “Fine Arts” first in Brunswick, then later at the Academy of Art in the Bavarian town of Munich under the famous Professor Teutsch.

After getting some money through the making of portrait paintings, Gerd’s chance to travel came in 1950 and he started a pilgrimage tour to Italy’s capital Rome. From Rome, he went to Palermo in Sicily and jumped on to North Africa never to return to Europe again. Like the “hippies” in the 1970s going east, Gerd worked his way for good through Libya, Egypt, Ethiopia and Kenya, getting impressed by the natives. He also visited the Seychelles and finally arrived in 1952 at the port city of Bombay on the Indian sub-continent.

Living some time in Jaipur, Rajasthan that he very much associated with Africa, Gerd left in 1953 to far away Singapore, from where it was near to reach the Indonesian islands, Java and Bali. Especially Bali was the place where he got his further influences on the art of painting in oil and charcoal. Via Hong Kong, Gerd finally reached Thailand’s capital Bangkok in 1956, where he met his future wife and made his way up to Chiang Mai in 1957. The couple married in 1958 and the wedding party was done at the Arun Rai Restaurant located just outside the moat of Old Chiang Mai that still exists today.

In 1972, after some short one-year stunts in Macao (1960) and Kuala Terenganu (1964), as well as an exquisite visit to the long houses of the headhunting Dayaks along the Rajang River in Sarawak, Gerd was ready to build his own teakwood house at 34/1 Huei Kaew Road. The one-rai piece of land he had acquired from his best Thai friend, the late Chao Pattana Na Lamphun. The two-storey house with a veranda was in full view of the holy Doi Suthep Mountain. Most of all, he built it for his wife Prapai and foster daughter, also for the storage of his oil paintings and charcoal collection of more and more portrayed hill tribe people.

Needless to say that Gerd has held many art exhibition of his works at places as far away as Calcutta, New Delhi, Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Hong Kong and of course Bangkok, supported by the British Council or the German Goethe Institute. Even though his fame as a painter never reached that one of Theo Meier, his contemporary colleague in Chiang Mai, his sketches can easily been found in many homes of some of his closest friends around.

Gerd Barkowsky surprisingly died at the early age of 60 on 29 July 1986 after a short illness. His last will was written and after his cremation - “Mae Khong” was needed to ignite the flames - the ashes were buried in peace in a grave at the International Cemetery in Chiang Mai. Luckily, his oil paintings and charcoal works will survive forever.

Special thanks go to Major Roy Hudson, who has mentioned Gerd Barkowsky in his 1965 and 1966 authored , and writer John Cadet, who has published an article about Gerd Barkowsky in the Asia Magazine, April 25, 1982. Without their generously supplied material, this article could not have been written.

For further information, please contact Reinhard Hohler by e-mail.