Artist Statement
My paintings are an expression of the beauty and mystery that I sense all around in this world. I sense the hand of a more powerful being behind the physical world that surrounds us. The mysterious landscapes of Monterey and the jubilant sunflower fields of Umbria, though so different to each other, are one and the same expression of this greater power.
The portraits are representative of my portrait paintings of peoples of the world. Whether my subject is from Asia, Africa or America, they are each an expression of the potential in each man to a better world of peace and brotherhood.
I consider myself primarily a Judaic artist. A very large part of my work is inspired and driven by my Jewish heritage. Judaism and its culture inspire me and are very much the fabric of my life.
The threads of this fabric are in the life cycle events, the weekly Sabbath observance, the yearly observance of festivals and major holidays. I find myself being inspired by words, lines and stories in the Torah. It is here that I find beauty and joy and which I express in my art. In my teaching career, in a Jewish day school, I encountered this wonderment through the innocent eyes of my young students.
In addition to Torah, traditions and the fascination with “le dor va dor”, my Sephardic culture and in my family history from the island of Rhodes, Greece, also inspire me. So much history unfolds itself to me as I walk the Jewish quarter, picturing the community with their stores, professions, and their shul as the centre of their Jewish life. I am at the moment creating a body of work that express the hopelessness and the void that is felt in Rhodes, since the entire Jewish population of that tiny island was annihilated by the Nazis.
Our ancestors handed down Judaism to us, I hold it now as my own and it becomes my legacy to my children, from one generation to the next. How better then, to communicate its richness, its wisdom and my love for it, than by creating art.
In an art world that is fast becoming exclusively abstract, the viewer sometimes needs a jolt of reality to face the world that surrounds him. I feel that my paintings do fall under the category of realism, but much more than that, I feel that I have important things to say to the world through my paintings. I delve into deep meanings of the universe and confront the beauty and miseries that surround us in our every day world.
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