Anyone who’s ever taken up drawing, especially life-drawing, knows that the difficulty comes not from the effort to draw but from the effort to see.

The reason we don’t really see what’s in front of us is that it is an incredibly inefficient way to live. If we had to consciously connect that shadow and that oblong beige shape with that brownish semi-circle and that highlight to reach the conclusion that there’s a bear about to pounce on us we would have been eaten before we would ever have recognized the danger. We do however, deep inside, retain the knowledge that what we sense is not really reality but a mental projection, an adequate approximation, in some sense: an illusion.Art (and all science and religion for that matter) aspires to break through the sensory barrier and show or experience reality as it is.

The Surface: The surface on which i paint is made of layers upon layers of bits of fabric and paper glued together with high quality acrylic medium. This surface stands for the mental and emotional garbage, armor, which accumulates like barnacles on minds and souls.

The first piece i made using this material was a life-size human figure with a plastic bag in his chest connected to a compressor on a 4 second on/off cycle. All one could see about the figure was the slight inflation and deflation of the chest. The images i paint come to me fairly intuitively. Their function is, to a great extent, to give a sense of the relative emptiness of the rest of the painting.

Shelf paintings: Still-Life in the vein of Cotán or Morandi, that most retiring of genres, understands that saying something true about important things is impossible. Life, Love, Death, Society, God, are too big and contradictory to be truthfully summed in a work of art. Saying something absolutely true about a few small objects arranged on a shelf is just barely possible. Along the way i am tempted by the surreal and the symbolic but i think the best paintings are those that stick to the basic still-life arrangement.

Soldier paintings: As a child i loved to play with these soldiers. The paintings are a response to my experience in the Israeli army where i felt a disposable pawn. By extension it expresses a feeling i have of being a pawn in general. That greater powers, not necessarily benevolent, control my thoughts, my language, my taste, my politics.

Crane paintings: Like a child i am fascinated by cranes; by their lacework trusses, and am forever amazed that they don’t just fall over. Their improbability gives me hope that things may turn out well after all.