Penuel--a history of a series

Now come the finishing touches of the exhibition, including the one I hate the most: the dreaded Artist Statement. One would think that it would be a breeze, considering how much I run on and on, whether in blog or in person. But there is something artificial about giving a single official "Statement" about works in which so many factors are involved, about works that you hope would not be constrained by words. It also seems to put a cap, a closing, while I see this series as on-going. This exhibition is a midpoint, a stop for thinking, considering, hopefully for feedback. It is not definitive.

When I look at the works, I see a history rather than a statement. The

different thoughts, experiences. processes that went into them, the different currents of thought that came together. The series began, actually, from a project for class:

the NYSS opened with the "transcription project," in which all the students were meant to make three small paintings based on pieces from the history of art. The topic for the pro

ject was Eros. I looked through countless images, from medieval art to Paul Gauguin, including Canova's sculpture of Cupid and Psyche. Something in the pattern of interlinking arches drew me, and I photocopied some images for consideration. In the end, I found the sculpture too sentimental for the Eros project, and based myself on Velásquez's Venus at the Mirror and Rodin's Paulo and Francesca instead. However, the Canova images remained in my studio, totalizing me.

Due to very unpleasant circumstances, I had to change classes and studios at the

beginning of the second semester. I found myself in a new space, feeling off balance and out of place. As an opening warm up, I decided to explore the Canova image in a charcoal drawing. To my surprise, small variations in the angles transformed a tender image of lovers into two figures locked in combat. This connected in my head to Rodin's drawings of wrestlers, which keep transforming into lovers--images that had also been in my studio since I had made my painting of Paulo and Francesca.

This led me to make more studies off the Canova image, trying to touch the abstract elements that allowed these two energies to co-exists.

These became Penuel I and II:

But I became more and more interested in the charcoal drawing, which had transformed for me from Cupid and Psyche into Jacob and the angle of Genesis 32. I emphasized the lines of struggle with lines, changed the angle of the head of the lower figure--now Jacob. The assailant became dark, ominous, the wing's transformed from soft feather to harsh line. The drawing connected to an earlier, abandoned series based on Gerard Manley Hopkin's Terrible Sonnets.

I began a new drawing, this time in ink, in which I combined my new image of struggle with the handwritten text of excerpts of Hopkin's "Carrion Comfort," where he uses the metaphor of Jacob's struggle with the angle to describe his own crisis of faith and battle with depression. This poem had reached out and grabbed me like a hand from the grave the first time I read it, and had remained on my mind ever since. On an intellectual level, I loved the seamless merging of the personal life with the biblical text, the archetypal framing of experience. On an emotional level, parts of the poem became a mantra against my own doubts about my art and my choice to leave Israel for art school--doubts which had become stronger in the wake of an anti-Semitic incident that had forced me to switch groups in mid-year.

The poem and the biblical passage it evokes had also gained new resonance for me. This was the first time I had been out of Israel for a prolonged period of time, and the first time I had been in context where I had to deal with continuous verbal attacks on my country. Homesick and alone, the story of Jacob's transformation into Israel became a way to meditate on what it means to be from Israel, and on the struggle for survival and for identity.

So that is reconstruction of how a simple warm up exercise exploring a juxtaposition of angles became a nexus for considering my relation to art, aspects of literature, the connection of text to image, and also issues of national and personal identity... a lot of weight for paintings to carry...which is why it's sometimes better to let these things remain unsaid.