My Approach To Art

There is no way to “outdo” the created world in terms of beauty, to make anything more exquisite than it already is, in my view. So the best an artist can do is to look at the real world and find the light within it, not always meaning real light, but the spiritual light. And an artist doesn’t have to try to be unique or create something out of the ordinary, because every artist sees the world somewhat differently. Every person does. So ten artists can paint the same scene, and they’ll all paint different paintings. They can’t help that. The impressionists showed light by focussing on the color and light in a more fleeting way, by working more quickly than earlier painters.  They understood that shadow has a color and light has a color. Still the paintings were based on the beauty of what is real.

Even a scene has a type of soul, an aura, a special sense about it. Sometimes I have an idea about a painting based on an experience I’ve had, even a simple, everyday experience. Once in the summer I was on a walk in our neighborhood, and on my way I saw several little creatures and some larger ones walking around. And I saw some people of different ages, who to me, looked sweet and somehow special. When I came home I thought “what an unusual, what a unique neighborhood we live in, where deer, turkeys, geese. and other animals walk around and feel comfortable with us!! They don’t run away from us, but just take their time walking across the street.” Yes they still have their natural desire to be separate from us and don’t let us get too close, but at the time of my walk it seemed out of the ordinary to me. I might have been too romantic about it, but I thought that this subject would make a pleasant, child-like,  painting. You can see this on my website, called “Our Neighborhood.” And we have people come to our neighborhood frequently, collecting money for good causes, and two of them are in the painting also. Portraying the group of people and animals seemed important to me. In the everyday, a person is able to see something beyond the everyday.

Sometimes my paintings are a literal construction. Someone commissioned me to make an oil painting for a children’s playroom in a synagogue. They wanted me to show some of the good deeds that young children can do. So I thought of images for that and tried to put them together in one painting. The person wanted a specific Hebrew phrase in the painting to commemorate someone and so I added that as well.

A person is very complex. Everyone has some quality that is unique within them.  Art is a visual language so it can be difficult to express that uniqueness. Therefore I try to be faithful to what I see and by combining their features, the light and shadow, and an expression, I hope to, by induction, make that quality show in the portrait.

Sometimes I am inspired by words that contain imagery as in a poem or the Psalms. They ring true to me, as in “You Are My Hiding Place.” I wanted to show that this reality was true for me, and so I used an image from a Psalm. 

Sometimes a place has an enigmatic quality to it, and I try to convey that. When there is a scene that is inspiring to me it usually has to do with the quality of the light.  Leo Tolstoy once said  “All the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.” Yes, true. Because light, for me, has to do with something eternal.