Paved Roads

Our roads are paved; the well-packed lanes draw a close-knit network of coordinates for us, with which we can navigate our lives with the certainty of knowledge. Ratios and specific proportions are the correct measure. All of these bestow calm upon us. We gain certainty from comprehension.

We obtain serenity from the familiar.

Habits, too, are part of the same wondrous array we all construct for ourselves.

We will take apart, organize, and rebuild the space so as not to get lost, from pole to pole, from border to border, from item to item.

We shall know how to draw so we can understand where we are and how to go on.

Time is a part of this journey. Repeating habits give it sequence and meaning, the familiar and the known – the certainty.

This is a significant part of our life’s toil, and we will hardly find space for a deviation from it in the economy of our soul. Not for nothing do we focus on procedures and invest our daily routines in them. It is not inflexibility but rather a concern. In painting, it is the external gaze that is external to the thing itself. The gaze that exposes hidden mechanisms of relationships and repeating patterns. It relinquishes historical events, but the domestic is also subject to it: a beloved woman in a chair, a street in Shapira, or a view from the studio’s window are part of its many expressions.

And the color?

This is the painterly lapsus, what is ejected from the mouth of the tube – where does it come from? It is our life secretion, our secret fears – our daring.

Where the unsaid comes true.

It is not just pigment laid on canvas, but the unsaid-unnamed. An act of exposure.

This is an exaggeration that exceeds the facts, a green room with a red woman like fruit bursting with blood in the dimness of the studio, or the violet of walls in a neighborhood that is all hopeless gray. 

Unexpected truth.

Eran Ehrlich, Aug. 2025