BIOGRAPHY

Michael Reinardy was born in 1943 in Silesia, which at that time was an eastern part of Germany, but today is in western Poland. The spring of his life coincided with the autumn of WW2, and his earliest memories are of the huge and tumultuous displacement of people. His father, an architect, had been taken prisoner in Italy and was later transferred to France. At the end of the war his mother, a secondary school teacher of music and German, rejoined her husband in Belfort, and this is where five-year-old Michael met his father for the first time. It was also where he started school. Beginning with the traumatic experience of being a German boy in a French school at the end of the war, and followed by many changes of school, it was not surprising that Michael's relationship to formal education was problematic. The family returned to Germany when Michael was eight years old, and it rapidly increased to three more boys and then one girl. Settling in Bensberg, a town to the east of Cologne, in a house designed by his father and which Michael, now a teenager, helped to build, his friction with the education system grew to the point that he left school without any qualification. This limited significantly his choice of future employment, but he managed to be taken on as an apprentice gold and silver smith for church ware, making chalices, monstrances, tabernacles, candelabra and so on. It was at this time that he started painting seriously. He met and got acquainted with many artists. As it was the early sixties, he also became  very involved in student demonstrations and political activism. On learning that the authorities had 'a file' on him, he paused and considered where his life was leading. He felt an urgent desire to find more meaning to his existence. It was 1963 and he ended up in Glencraig, a residential home for special needs children in Northern Ireland. It was part of the Camphill Movement, founded by Karl König in 1940 and based on the philosophical teachings of Rudolf Steiner, known as Anthroposophy. Here Michael found his true place. He returned to Germany after two years to do a teacher's training in arts and crafts, but was back again immediately after. With his fiancée Heidi, they moved to Camphill in Aberdeen, where they both completed the Camphill Seminar to become curative teachers. When they married in 1969, they took on the role of houseparents and began to raise their family, which grew to one boy and four girls. They have remained in the Camphill Movement ever since. From Camphill Aberdeen they moved to Templehill Community, near Stonehaven, on the east coast of Scotland, and then to Camphill Community Clanabogan, near Omagh, in Northern Ireland. Michael's entire adult life has been dedicated to curative teaching, in the form  of arts and crafts workshops. Painting, woodwork, pottery, candle-making, paper-making and an overwhelming fascination with stones and gems and lapidary. His hands have never been idle. His creativity has never ceased. At the age of sixty, he enrolled at the Leith School of Art, and on completing a post-graduate arts course, he finally formalised with a recognized qualification, his life-long passion of painting. Since then he hasn't stopped. However, his artistic output became much more intense and prolific following major heart surgery in 2017. Now in the autumn of his own life,  he describes these latter years as a watershed, like a bursting dam of creative energy.