Since September 2023 I'm staying with my friend in New York. It was a hard year in Israel and I decided it was time to leave for my usual two-months-away, and then the angel of death descended upon the region and started his ominous tour de force, still going on as I am writing these words.
So I stayed. For now. For a while longer, until they stop figthing. Which turns out to be wishful thinking. But I am still wishing.
Here in New York, apart from some heavy rain in September, and first snow as late as mid-January, life still flows with relative ease. I am painting in the little studio I have created in the bedroom where I'm staying - a tabletop that needed to be cleared, and nothing more. Packages arrive from art stores, and I am busy painting away, in oil, though occasionally doing a quick sketch in a library or cafe. Suspended in mid-air, draped in uncertainty about the rest of my life, wondering if I can easily move to another country, or just continue traveling to wherever will have me, and hard questions about the future of that country I happen to be born in, and therefore seemingly attached to, somehow.
But I manage to live in this time bubble, protected from all evil, and pretending I do not have a ticket to go back later in February. Painting subjects vary, I believe that my life - my worries and joys, troubles and accidents, love and passion and observation and fascination, all that goes into what I do. Always. So, the light in the tunnel, and not at the end of it, is subject of a lot of my recent work.
Live through it, drive through it, see it all, remain myself.
Last pair below, juxtaposed Florida (Everglades) and New York
So I stayed. For now. For a while longer, until they stop figthing. Which turns out to be wishful thinking. But I am still wishing.
Here in New York, apart from some heavy rain in September, and first snow as late as mid-January, life still flows with relative ease. I am painting in the little studio I have created in the bedroom where I'm staying - a tabletop that needed to be cleared, and nothing more. Packages arrive from art stores, and I am busy painting away, in oil, though occasionally doing a quick sketch in a library or cafe. Suspended in mid-air, draped in uncertainty about the rest of my life, wondering if I can easily move to another country, or just continue traveling to wherever will have me, and hard questions about the future of that country I happen to be born in, and therefore seemingly attached to, somehow.
But I manage to live in this time bubble, protected from all evil, and pretending I do not have a ticket to go back later in February. Painting subjects vary, I believe that my life - my worries and joys, troubles and accidents, love and passion and observation and fascination, all that goes into what I do. Always. So, the light in the tunnel, and not at the end of it, is subject of a lot of my recent work.
Live through it, drive through it, see it all, remain myself.
Last pair below, juxtaposed Florida (Everglades) and New York
