Home Run

One sketch after another, what makes an artist stay alone in his studio
for hours on end, while others go out for a drink, a movie or just
meeting friends? It is said that the writer’s work is done in solitude, and
perhaps in the same way, I ‘write’ paintings.
I write about anything that catches my eye. As the world goes on
spinning around me, I build a personal reservoir of sights and
impressions. Long walks along familiar streets, provide endless new
images and shapes that stay in my head like a snapshot, waiting or
even demanding to resurface when I pick up the brush.
The medium of painting in particular lends itself to the transition of the
mundane into drama. Quick brushstrokes and broad swaths of paint,
spontaneous and unrestrained, perfectly capture these fleeting
moments ingrained in my mind. The shapes appear on the paper just
as randomly as those encounters did throughout my life. From dormant
memories like the vase that enchanted me as a child and the old Ford
pickup truck of the Kibbutz bakery, to the horses that I used to (and still
do) admire, and the captivating London gasometers and power
stations. They reappear out of the blue, as if to remind you of their
existence, working their way onto the canvas alongside the image of
your son, stretching on the IKEA armchair in your living room last night.
What these unrelated elements all share in common, is being stripped
of any context once they have entered the painting. They are no longer
bound to a specific location or time period, and are just as free and
harmonious as they appear in your mind.
Working in a newspaper (Haaretz), I am surrounded by current affairs
and concrete matters, and must be ‘switched on’ at any time, all in
service of a clear and precise publication.
However in my ‘second shift’, at the studio, instincts break loose,
making way for the expression of random preferences, the choices
behind which lie deep within one’s subconscious, their meaning ever-
fleeting.
And now - a cup of coffee and a pastry from the patisserie around the
corner. A cockroach rushes behind a stack of canvases. I pull up
another Bob Dylan track from either youtube or spotify - it’s “Visions of
Johanna”. And so it begins.

E W