I have always been fascinated by the colors of the different landscapes and the beauty of the differences between landscapes. As a child I sometimes stood next to a tall building and looked up for a long time and saw how the building "traveled" in relation to the clouds above it. This made me feel like the captain of a ship making its way to the unknown, the clouds changed their shape and the bow of my ship sailed through magnificent landscapes of white, gray, silver and sometimes even colored cream. Its colors ranged from a soft vermilion red to the gold and did not pass over the various shades of purple, in the early morning, nor the lemon and banana yellow, before the sunset of the day.
Today, looking back, I interpret this as the behavior of a child who grew up in the urban suffocation who longed for open landscapes and compensated himself by inventing his own private landscapes. As a child, every trip and every trip to the open landscape made me transcend and overflow with accumulated experiences and beauty and looked for the way, in which I could also share with others. Apart from speech, I did not have any significant tools of expression that would allow me to convey, even a little, the beauty that I experienced.
I was a mischievous child and therefore obviously, "I spoke little and did a lot" but my urge to share my experiences with others did not disappear, so that when I was calm, I drew and drew, by any means that came my way and I did not even miss my homework notebooks or textbooks or the walls of our house.
When I was 11 years old, I immigrated to Israel with my family. My parents gave up all their possessions to immigrate to Israel, but managed to bring quite a few books with them.
Among the books was the French "Laros" dictionary, which included entries on many painters, including the French Impressionists. In this frame were photographs, the size of a stamp, of various works by Monet, Van Gogh, Pissarro, Cézanne and others. I read countless times every word that was written about them to know how I too could paint like them. From the information I gathered it was clear to me that they wrote with charcoal on paper and painted with oil paints on canvas stretched over a frame. As a child I was only familiar with gouache colors and colored pencils so I came across a new and undecipherable world which was the starting point for a journey to explore different colors and techniques. At first, though, I concentrated on the material and technical side, which I perceived as a child - mastering them would allow me to create paintings like those of those great artists.
In the first stages, I diluted gouache paints with cooking oil from my late mother's kitchen and painted on various papers, which were at hand. I drew with charcoal from the remains of fires and copied the best works of the Impressionists with colors that I had innocently concocted. The colors gradually fell out of their bases, papers were torn and worst of all the paint would dry and stain everything that came in contact with it.
I also tried to mix the gouache colors with margarine, apparently they mixed with the color more successfully than with oil, but this mixture also did not solve any problem and there was no chance that the color would dry in our generation.
Over time, I gradually integrated the methods, until I reached the stage where I created colors from a pigment powder of siding, simple linseed oil and mineral turpentine, which I purchased at a hardware store. This mixture, which I came across by chance, served as a correct starting base for the oil colors we know.
Over time I was able to find the right formula from which the artistic oil paint is built on the basis of fine pigment, refined linseed oil, wood turpentine and Damar resin.
Since then, I immersed myself in copying the paintings of the great artists, for a considerable number of hours, every day, at first I did not master the mixing of the colors to achieve nuances in the different darknesses and only after a long time did I discover the secret of the complementary colors based on the theory of the Impressionist spectrum.
At a certain point I realized that copying paintings is ultimately a purely technical performance, for a work in which I have no part. This is also the stage where I realized that I had to study regularly and all the knowledge I had acquired until then made me realize that I still knew nothing about art in general and painting in particular.
Already at the age of 14, I started searching for the magic register that turns a drawing into a work of art. I grew up, I studied and later I also taught and all the time I painted non-stop. At first I drew from whatever was next to me and then I drew in different styles and many techniques while constantly searching. I held solo exhibitions and participated in countless group exhibitions. I hardly missed any style from surrealism and hyperrealism to conceptual painting and conceptual art. In certain areas I created some innovations and in other areas I felt that I was stepping on the spot. I continued to draw and search relentlessly.
In recent years I have begun to understand the essence of my search in particular and what an artist is in general. In my opinion, the desired goal is the search itself! There are no miracle prescriptions.
Knowing techniques and styles, even at the highest levels, can allow anyone to paint. On the other hand, the search - it is the real challenge for the intellect and emotions all along the way!!!
It is possible that being an artist means striving to continue searching relentlessly in all the veins of the soul and thinking and above all to love it.
It is also possible that it is the love of the search that leads to the joy of creation.
Lately, I have been mainly engaged in the search for the expression of the beauty and versatility of our country on its landscapes, its people and its heritage - using all the knowledge and experience I have gained over the years of my search.
Today, my style can be called an experiential painting that is based on impressionism, planarism (painting in the open air) and as the realizations of the Israeli painters who were looking for how to deal with the landscape of the Land of Israel and its special light such as the groups "New Horizons", "Climate" and other respected artists.
All I want now is to keep searching, drawing and enjoying it as much as possible.
