I was born in Israel, migrated with my parents to New York City at age ten. It was my parents’ second migration. They were both originally from Poland. A journalist who had worked as a reporter for The Miami Herald and had written for The Washington Post, I returned to Israel.
Restlessness is reflected in my work. I likes to experiment and invent new techniques, always asking the question: “I wonder what will happen if…”
I have a notebook in which I write my “what if…” questions. New ones pop up in my mind all the time, sometimes during the night and I can’t keep up with the list. I have more questions than answers.
With a family history of inter-generational migration, bouncing back and forth between continents, it is not surprising that my new series explores the subject of journeys.
But just because I wander does not mean I’m lost.
I began my “Journey” series two years ago with unstretched canvasses, two meters long by one meter wide, on which I rendered thin black lines that curve, meander, turn a corner, meet, veer away and at times intersect. Knowing how way leads on to way (in the words of poet Robert Frost) and since lines can fold back in time and space, I began folding the canvases creating new intersections for the lines to meet, worm holes of sort. At first the folds were pressed flat but over time the folded canvasses began amassing volume turning into wall sculptures breaking the bourgeois concept of traditional canvass stretched on wooden frames.
But with each folding of the canvas there is also loss, parts that must be reluctantly given up and hidden, just like the parts one leaves behind when one leave on a journey. It takes courage to let go.
I “stretch” the concept of canvas as far as I can with playful experimentation.
The only painting done on a traditional canvas in this series is a work titled “We Only Have What We Bear and What We Give.” It depicts an old woman, bent over trudging on a long journey burdened by a heavy load. But even here I break tradition and paint on the backside of the canvas. I collaged the wooden frame with bits of vintage black and white photographs telling humanity’s journey from newly hatched fish eggs to dinosaurs’ bones, a misty rain, an English tea set and skyscrapers.
I like to collage vintage black and white photographs in my work which evoke layers of memory. I began this process while preparing for my last solo exhibition, “Moscow to Berlin,” which opened in Israel and then traveled to Poland and France.
It was about memory, my mother’s journey as a soldier in the Polish army during World War II. In those works, I embedded sepia photographs of my mother plus historic yellowing bits of 70-year-old letters she wrote to her parents from the front. (Copies, not the originals) The paintings in cool whites and creams, dark blacks and gloomy greys were all done on traditional stretched canvases.
My work changes over time. I have not yet settled on a specific signature style that is immediately recognizable. I am OK with that.
For now, I am much too curious to settle into one mode. I was a professional journalist for many years and the same curiosity drives my art.
In one recent work I took an older, heavily textured abstract stretched canvas and overcame a natural inhibition. I took a knife and slashed it in two places. I then threaded through the two cuts a newly-painted unstretched canvas so that the two works merged into one.
I don’t know if I will ever be able to go back to painting on a canvas sitting prettily on an easel. Like Robert Frost said in his poem about a traveler who must choose between two roads and takes the one less travelled by. He wrote, “I doubted I should ever come back.” He ends with the line: “And that has made all the difference.”
Indeed.
