Still life with artichoke Painting

I have been drawing and painting for the last fifteen years, during which I have studied with a number of teachers, including David Nipo and Israel Hershberg. The main part of my training was at the Jerusalem studio school Master Class: a full time program, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. During my studies, I was introduced to the vast tradition of painting, starting with the art of greece and Rome, through the renaissance, all the way to today’s figurative painting. Today, in my studio, i'm continuing to work mostly with traditional mediums – oil paints, charcoal and pencils. For me, painting is first of all a language, and as all other languages, it requires a community and a history. When I'm painting, I see myself as having a conversation with the artists of ancient greece and rome, and at the same time, thinking about my personal attribution to this tradition, as a modern painter. As in all other languages, painting has its own agreed signes. My work as a painter is to build sentences from pictorial signs such as lines, spots, colors notes, composition, edge and harmony, while continually trying to make them more accurate and precise. I see value in perfecting these pictorial signs. A perfect color note or a precise geometry can both be exciting in themselves. A lot of art works these days have a graphic quality to them. They have a big immediate impact, but nothing more then this first impression. It reflects our culture – we are exposed to thousands of visual images each day, and we usually don't have the time to give them enough attention. I am searching to create a different visual experience – the type that will ask the viewer to stop and contemplate, and that will demand you to invest time in it. My goal is to create paintings that unravel more and more, once you stop and take the time viewing them. My self-expression as a painter lies in the choices I make. There is too much information in reality itself, much more than can be expressed, and what makes art interesting, in my eyes, is the information the artist chooses out of this chaos. In this sense, I am not a realistic painter. I am not streaming to include each detail in a portrait. On the contrary – I strive for simplification, based on the most important details, which will represent my personal experience. I want to offer other people the chance to see the things through my eyes. The same situation can be seen differently by different artists.