Teddie, Shoshkie and Naomi

One of my recent commissions came from a customer who wanted a special birthday card for her niece, Rebecca. The brief was simple. The card was to feature her dog, Teddie, and include a large "27" somewhere in the design. My customer sent me a couple of photos of Teddie, and I got to work.

The card was fun to create and was very well received. My customer was keen to share that her niece adored the card!

Back in February, Mister Handmade in Israel and I went to the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation in the port city of Jaffa to hear the artist Zeev Engelmayer speak about his artistic work and activism. Working under the creative persona "Shoshke", Engelmayer is known in Israel for his ongoing illustrated "Daily Postcard" project. Through these drawings, he responds to current events, politics, and social issues with honesty and insight. I have followed his postcards closely since the outbreak of the war and was keen to hear what he had to say about them.

Since the 7th of October, when Hamas terrorists attacked Israel's Gaza border communities, killing thousands, committing atrocities, and abducting hundreds, Shoshke has been drawing his interpretation of the day's distressing events on a regular basis. Although he has now turned his attention to larger projects, during the war he would sit each morning at a small kitchen table in his Tel Aviv apartment overlooking the Florentin neighbourhood and create his "Daily Postcards", depicting hostages, soldiers, and mourners. He portrayed the Bibas family - mum Shiri, dad Yarden, and red-haired preschoolers Ariel and baby Kfir - as well as 80-year-old Yaffa Adar, a released hostage, riding home in a heart-festooned golf cart with ballerinas alongside her. In other works, Mary Poppins magically brings hostages home beneath floating parasols, while in another, child hostages travel on a rainbow from Gaza to Tel Aviv, above. He also responded to the daily reports of soldiers killed in Gaza and, more recently, in Lebanon.
Shoshke's colourful A4-sized "Daily Postcards" capture the horror, fear, and sorrow of the war, but they also offer a different way of engaging with the day's unfolding reality. Through humour, emotion, and illustration, he approached painful subject matter in a way that can bring a sense of comfort. The public responded immediately, sending messages and requests for him to tell the stories of their loved ones. We also asked whether he would consider portraying Gadi's story, though that now seems unlikely.
I was pleased to be able to purchase one of Shoshke's prints, and now have it framed and ready to hang on the wall as soon as I find the right spot for it.

The Hebrew text reads: "Today all the hostages are returning home"

Since losing Gadi, neither Mister Handmade in Israel nor I have really been in the mood to listen to music. However, we were recently given tickets for a tribute performance to Naomi Shemer at the Cameri Theatre in Tel Aviv, and we decided to give it a go.
Naomi Shemer was an iconic Israeli songwriter, composer, and performer who, in her own words, wrote "a thousand songs and one more". The tribute evening was curated by her son, the acclaimed musician Ariel Horowitz. The show was a musical journey through her well-known Hebrew songs, interwoven with personal stories about her life and working process. It featured songs she wrote and composed herself, poems by other writers she chose to set to music, and songs she translated. These include Lu Yehi (Let It Be), Al Kol Eleh (For All These Things), and the Six-Day War anthem Yerushalayim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold), among others.
The Israeli actress, comedian and television presenter Rivka Michaeli, Naomi Shemer's close friend, appeared on stage alongside Tamar Giladi, Shemer's daughter-in-law and Ariel Horowitz's wife, and Lali Shemer, her daughter. Each of them shared small anecdotes from Shemer's life. Together, they offered a personal and intimate glimpse behind the scenes of the woman often regarded as the First Lady of Hebrew Song.
It was a moving evening that celebrated Shemer's extraordinary body of work, and we both thoroughly enjoyed it. Although she passed away more than twenty years ago, in 2004, her songs continue to live on.

Photo by Boris Carmi, courtesy of the Meitar Collection, Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, National Library of Israel

A Tribute to Naomi Shemer at the Cameri Theatre - singer Adi Cohen performs “Jerusalem of Gold”

* This post has been shared on Happiness is Homemade, Mosaic Monday, Handmade Monday, Monday Morning Blog Club, Busy Monday, Talking About It Tuesdays, The Happy Now Blog Link-Up, Wonderful Wednesday Blog Hop, Thursday Favorite Things and Crazy Little Lovebirds.

You Must Choose Life – That is Art: Pinchas Litvinovsky

Several months ago I went to see the exhibition "You Must Choose Life - That is Art", at Beit Avi Chai in Jerusalem. The exhibition showcased the work of one of Israel's most influential artists, Pinchas Litvinovsky.

Pinchas Litvinovsky was born in 1894 to a religious family of Jewish merchants in the city of Novogeorgievsk (then the Russian Empire, now Ukraine). At the age of 18 he began studying at the Academy of Art in Odessa, where he met Boris Schatz, the founder of the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem. Schatz invited the youngster to attend Bezalel, and also offered him a scholarship. Litvinovsky moved to the Land of Israel, but shortly after returned to Russia where he studied at the Academy of Art in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg). In 1917 he married Lisa, née Torgovsky; the couple had two daughters. He returned to pre-state Palestine with his wife in 1919 on board the famous ship "S.S. Ruslan". He first settled in Tiberias, then in the late 1930s he joined an artists' colony that was established in Motza Ilit, integrating into Israel's art and culture life, designing stage sets for the Habima theatre in Tel Aviv and the Ohel Theatre. In 1924 he participated in the "Hebrew Artists Association" exhibition held at the Tower of David. In the early 1950s he settled in the Katamon neighbourhood of Jerusalem.

The transition from Eastern Europe to the scorching sun of the Middle East caused for a stylistic, thematic and colour change in Litvinovsky's work. He portrayed the daily life he saw in the Galilee and the Judean Mountains: Arabs in keffiyehs, Hasidim in shtreimels, Yemenis with sidelocks, women in veils and women in snoods, as well as local farm animals such as donkeys and camels. Litvinovsky returned to these figures throughout his life.

From the 1930s onwards, Litvinovsky travelled for long periods to Europe and the United States, where he encountered the works of Georges Rouault, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and the painters of the School of Paris. Over the years his artistic style underwent transformations under their influence, from Constructivism and Russian Impressionism at the beginning of his career, through modernist and expressive trends, to formal and colourful abstractions in the later period of his life. For his achievements, Litvinovsky was awarded the Israel Prize for Painting in 1980.

Litvinovsky was not part of any artistic group, rarely exhibited his works and never dated or named them. He became known for his portraits of famous people from Israel and around the world but, apart from portraiture, he usually avoided selling his pieces.  After his death, the painter's estate numbered over 6,000 works, held in his Katamon studio, a house previously used by the British Deputy High Commissioner and given to Litvinovsky by Moshe Dayan. However, the estate encountered various hardships over the years, which culminated in the painter's grandson reducing the thousands of works to only a few hundred due to the pressing need to vacate Litvinovsky's residence. The exhibition at Beit Avi Chai aimed to highlight the best of the remaining pieces of Litvinovsky's work.

Litvinovsky did not sell his paintings as a matter of principle but, since he still had to support himself and his family, he chose to do so by painting commissioned portraits, which established him in the eyes of the Israeli public as the national portrait painter. When an institution or the State of Israel wanted to present a public, state, or international figure with a gift, they obtained photographs of the recipient and gave them to Litvinovsky. He would then use these photographs to paint the requested portrait. 

Among the hundreds of portraits that Litvinovsky painted over his lifetime, he painted USA presidents Harry Truman and John Kennedy, and the Israeli presidents Chaim Weizmann, Yitzhak Ben Zvi and Zalman Shazar. Other portraits included those of Chaim Nahman Bialik, Meir Dizengoff, Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir. The dozens dedicated to David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of the State of Israel, stand out. A selection were included in the exhibition, above, with Litvinovsky not only demonstrating the different faces of the "old man", as Ben-Gurion was called, but first and foremost his own ability as a painter and his development from the realistic, academic artistic style towards colourful abstraction. 

Although born into a religious family of Jewish merchants, Litvinovsky abandoned the pious life of his youth but maintained a complex relationship with Jewish traditions. From the end of the 1950s, he began to incorporate quotes from Jewish texts into his paintings. He painted the words "You Must Choose Life", which were chosen for the title of the exhibition. The phrase comes from the book of Deuteronomy and relate to the signing of the covenant between G-d and the People of Israel:

"I call the heaven and earth as witnesses! Before you I have placed life and death, the blessing and the curse. You must choose life so that you and your descendants will survive" (Deuteronomy 30:13-19).

Towards the end of his life, Litvinovsky created an exceptional series of portraits of rabbis, most of them inspired by photographs and drawings he found in books, below. Unlike the official portraits, above, which he created on commission and based on precise sketches, the portraits of rabbis were created as part of an artistic study and a spiritual quest.

Litvinovsky used to paint at night while listening to music, so it is not surprising that the theme of music appears in many of his works. "The Violinist" series that he painted in the 1950s shows various versions of a violinist and a violin, the musical instrument perhaps most associated with Jewish identity and culture.

In the last decades of his life, Litvinovsky returned to images that he painted in the past. As a mature artist, he added far more of his own artistic approach and many of these works were painted on thin paper in a childlike style, with simple colorful lines that convey innocence and simplicity.

The very last room in the exhibition featured an interactive stand which offered visitors the opportunity to create their own Litvinovsky-style portrait using AI. A camera captured my portrait then, within seconds, I received four digital versions of myself, each rendered in a different Litvinovsky-inspired style. I chose my favourite version, above, and it was sent to my email. In a nod to the tragic fate of many of Litvinovsky's original works, the other images were erased entirely!

Pinchas Litvinovsky died on 15th September 1985, in Jerusalem. He was 91. Many of the pieces on display in the exhibition were seeing the light of day for the first time in 40 years.

* This post has been shared on Mosaic Monday, The Good. The Random. The Fun. and Wordless Wednesday (on Tuesday) and Wednesday Around the World.

Arty Stuff

Eden has been receiving birthday cards made by me ever since she was a young girl. Last year I made a card showing her working as a flight attendant for El Al, Israel's national airline, but this year she has changed direction somewhat and is now an art student at the Holon Institute of Technology.

Mum asked me to show Eden doing arty things on her card. She has been painting, creating collage, making Hebrew letters, and designing stuff on her MacBook, mum said. She also suggested that I include Eden's old white Toyota Corolla on the card.

I showed Eden with an artist's palette in one hand and a paintbrush in the other. She is surrounded by paints and pencils, and some scissors to represent the collage work she has been doing. Next to her is her laptop computer with the Hebrew letters Ayin (pronounced "ah-yeen") and Mem on the screen. They are the initials of her name. I added her car too. Finally, a big red number 25 marks her age.
Eden messaged me to say that she loved the card!

* This post has been shared on Craft Schooling Sunday, Happiness is Homemade and Wonderful Wednesday Blog Hop.

Zadok Ben-David - On The Other Side

I am a big fan of the Israeli artist Zadok Ben-David's work. You may remember the posts I wrote about his installations "People I Saw but Never Met" in October 2021, and "Blackfield" in February 2010. It's very hard to find the enthusiasm to do anything these days. Between losing Gadi and then the ongoing war, it somehow feels easier to just stay at home. But a good friend came to visit for a week from the UK and she thought that Ben-David's new exhibition "On the Other Side" sounded interesting. We went together and both enjoyed it very much.

The exhibition at the Tower of David Jerusalem Museum comprises striking sculptures and a beautiful video installation created by Ben-David. Some of the works are site specific, created especially for the museum, while others have already been exhibited internationally and are being shown in Israel for the first time.

The exhibition opened just a short time before the first anniversary of 7th October, when Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel through air, land and sea, killing over 1,200 people and taking 251 Israelis hostage. It touches upon the pain that sliced through Israelis and Jews worldwide, by reflecting the tension between the boundaries of man and nature - between loss and renewed growth, between darkness and light, between despair and optimism restored.

'Cypress Trees/Fringe of the Field'

The first installation to greet us at the entrance to the museum were seven tall cypress trees hand cut from steel, above, each depicting different points in the life cycle of a tree through the seasons, from bare branches to a full leafy tree. On a closer look these trees were in fact made up of different outlines of human figures intertwined to create the effect of the tree branches. Cypress trees are a symbol of mourning in classical mythology, and are often planted at Israeli cemeteries.

'The Other Side of Midnight'

Two installations were on display in a darkened exhibition space within the museum. 'The Other Side of Midnight', above, comprises more than 2,000 miniature butterflies and insects. One side of the work offers the viewer a beautiful and optimistic world of butterflies, hand painted in bright fluorescent colours on a fine stainless-steel disc. But the other side of the piece changes that feeling to one of apprehension at the sight of insects. A closer look reveals that there are human figures rather than insects placed in between the butterfly wings, whereas the other side of the disc reveals the insects without their wings. The work was first created in 2012 and is being show for the first time in Israel.

'Same Place, Other Times'

The video work 'Same Place, Other Times', above, runs in a loop of 120 seconds and depicts a gradual transition from light to darkness, day to night, life to death. The panorama of a blooming, flower-filled field that is slowly being destroyed until it is reduced to scorched earth symbolizes the cycle of life. Ben-David sculpted each flower used in the video, and while the work was created in 2008, it has become a metaphor for the burnt, destroyed fields of Israel's south, destroyed by Hamas.

'Innerscapes on the Move'

A circle of human figures standing on the remains of the round Muslim tower, once part of David's citadel, is called 'Innerscapes on the Move', above. The figures expressive gestures and their internal activities together form a collective of human emotions and relationships. It is an installation that shows Ben-David's ongoing concern and interest in the individual and society.

'Trio of Flowers'

Lastly, 'Trio of Flowers' was created especially for the Tower of David. Three oversized, brightly painted flowers are placed against a mirror. One side of each flower is painted in vivid colors and the other side is black, which is revealed only through the mirror. This is another reminder of the cycle of life. Among the three flowers on display, the sabra plant, middle photo, symbolizes both Israeli and Arab culture.

Views of the Old City of Jerusalem, above, taken from

the Tower Of David.

The archaeological finds in the courtyard and the Ottoman minaret in the Tower of David, below.

Zadok Ben-David was born in Yemen and immigrated to Israel with his family at just six months old. In the early 1970s, he attended the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. After fighting in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Ben-David attended the School of Art at the University of Reading in the UK, and completed studies in sculpture at St. Martin’s School of Art in London, where he taught for five years. In 1988, Ben-David was chosen to represent Israel at the Venice Biennale, and he went on to win many international awards, exhibiting his work worldwide.

Ben-David was in Japan on 7th October 2023, but within days came to Israel, where his elderly father and other family and friends live. He began working on "On the Other Side". The exhibition symbolically reflects the cycles of nature, reminding us that, like nature, we too will return, renew, and bloom again.

* This post has been shared on The Good. The Random. The Fun., Mosaic Monday, Wordless Wednesday (on Tuesday) and My Corner of the World.