"I was aged around eleven or twelve. The teacher asked us to paint a circus. I had seen such wonderful circuses in Belgium, and so it was a delightful task. The teacher pinned my work up for all to see."

Karel remembers that his first box of paints came from this time at Friar's School, Bangor. The rest of Karel's school experience was not quite so positive. Ironically, although he was trilingual in French, Flemish and Dutch, his English and Welsh were so poor that the teachers and headmaster openly ridiculed and beat him, considering him a poor student; eventually stopping his art classes as a punishment.

For his parents, however, integration into British society was essential to their future existence, so any complaints Karel had fell on deaf ears. "I was their ambassador. They thought that because I was a child I would easily become assimilated - this wasn't the case."

Karel's experience of art in Wales was equally difficult to comprehend. "I couldn't understand why the churches and people's houses here had hardly any sculpture or works of art. There were no art galleries either."

Perhaps because of their tenuous position as exiles, Karel felt he had to fight for his parents. "People treated my father as 'the little foreigner'. I once punched someone for treating him so badly. Yet by showing my anger I only brought more retribution from my parents who wanted me to fit in. Perhaps this has turned me into someone who is at once a frightened and sometimes aggressive person and on the other hand a lover of my fellow man, particularly those who are suffering or oppressed."

Karel's art is a statement then of an uneasy relationship to 20th century man. He uses painting as a means of expressing his own often alienated childhood and also as a celebration of the richness of the potential protection and love within human relationship.

Karel once painted a series of crucifixions and ecce homo s which he described as a catharsis of his whole life experience. "My hurt at anti-Semitism was eventually redirected towards racism in general. I am the first to admit that racism, not simply anti-Semitism, exists in all cultures."

Karel's work has been influenced by the Flemish painter Constance Permeke ( example ), who, he says "tries to paint the souls of his subjects".

"Even if I start to paint someone I don't particularly like, by the end of the painting I have changed my attitude to them. I see the God in them, you come face to face with something bigger than you are. When I see a man sitting in a pub I simply paint what I see. I don't have anger for him. I just see another human being and I paint."

In many of his works, even simple drawings, Karel draws the viewer's eye to how people's posture betrays their inner emotions. "This is one reason why I love to paint jazz musicians. They are so expressive when they play."

"I do some drawing every day. It has more directness than painting. I sometimes paint from what someone called 'emotional memory'. I don't choose to be alone when I work. I will often leave my studio door open to keep contact with my wife Phyllis.

Karel is a very prominent community artist in North Wales. He is often to be found jazz busking to raise funds for a local hospital, or running community arts workshops for underprivileged groups.