Shulamit
Near

My paintings originate from the observed world around me. For many years, I lived and painted in Jerusalem; eight years ago, I returned to my childhood landscapes in the Galilee. For the past twenty years, I’ve been painting landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. My paintings explore composition, space, possible colour combinations, and how the size of the painting affects the viewer.

Light and shadow are an inseparable part of my art. As I paint, the sun moves, rapidly changing the landscape before me. In contradistinction to a photographic snapshot, this is a process of observing and capturing moments of shifting light, colour, and form. This allows me to make a painting composed of multitude changes that occur in a landscape or person, due to a shifting light or a change in mood.

I execute my paintings in a methodical and slowly considered process that is durational and precise. I go out into the landscape in my car, which doubles as a mobile studio, observing how the landscape changes throughout the day and the changing seasons. A process that can last a few days or several years and culminates in a “portrait of place”.

My portraits, too, begin with observation; and, when compelled to paint from photographs, I use a wide array of images to gain insight into the nature of the person I’m painting.

My work is influenced by the Old Masters, specifically the notion of “knowledge through making”. My ongoing dialogue with the works of painters like R. B. Kitaj, Edgar Degas, and Giovanni Bellini, is an additional beam of light illuminating my art.

Born to British parents, I’ve grown up in Israel, in a mix of Middle Eastern and European cultures, in the midst of conflict. My observation of landscape and people is free from political contexts and pathos. I seek my own path as an artist and a human being in a rapidly changing world; I stand in a street, a field, my studio, and paint as the spirit takes me. I make my everyday life an act of defiance; I live in an uncertain world, and the shifts contained within my paintings are moments of clarity in that uncertainty.