As a child, Rudolf had already developed a tradition of making his own gifts, drawings or paintings for festive occasions. He was a child, which was never bored, until today.
He continued this tradition as he grew up. In 1987 Rudolf fell in love with his future wife. At her first birthday together he asked himself what he should give her as a special gift. When he found an unused photo album and flipped through the empty pages, and when he saw the fields intended for glueing in photographs, he had an idea. Instead of gluing in photos, he covered the spaces in the album with a series of drawings, made in the style of a cartoon. In his cartoons he was telling the story of loneliness, of getting to know each other and of falling in love with each other.
The newly created unique book delighted his wife so much that she encouraged him to document their joint history over the following years in an ironic and humorous way.
Rudolf called his drawings EIPOP drawings to reflect their special character (see page “”What does EIPOP mean?”).
The initially small number of small drawings has grown to more than 1,450 drawings over the years until Rudolf’s wife died tragically in 2016 after 29 years of living together. With the death of his love, Rudolf stopped making EIPOP drawings as they were meant to document the couple’s exciting life.
A selection of his best EIPOPs were shown for the first time in public at TARS Gallery in Bangkok in 2018 / 2019 (www.tarsgallery.com) .
In order to explain the content and charm of the situations underlying the drawings, Rudolf wrote for each EIPOP drawing a poem in the Limerick verse-form (in German, English and some in French) or a short humorous essay (in German and English), a combination, which makes his work even more special.