Three artists, three questions: Bridging before and after

Half a year into the ongoing war, when each of us is trying to find some balance and a bit of normality in these hard and abnormal times, viewing art, in my opinion, gives us a chance to breathe.

Of course, the art world is not excluded from the war reality. Hostages Square, in front of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, speaks for itself. 

We have been witnessing the extensive response of art to the atrocities and the aftermath of Oct. 7, in both the content of the latest artistic output and the drive toward organizing charity art auctions. Some artists whose work is currently being exhibited have had to postpone their exhibition openings by many months, and some have donned uniforms and are serving the country.

When, in a July 2021 Magazine interview, Zadok Ben-David talked about drawing while being stuck in the Suez Canal as a young solder during the Yom Kippur War, I listened to his memories as if to a distant history. I certainly hadn’t remotely expected that in 2024, I would be speaking to another artist about a war who, as a called-up reservist, would have similar experiences now.

Three artists, all born in Israel (separated by decades) whose art, among many newly opened shows, caught my attention, don’t directly relate to the current situation. They simply continue to work, reminding us, the viewers, that we cannot forget what was important to us before the war. That there must be a “bridge” between before and now.

Three artists agreed to answer my three questions: 

• What inspires you? 
• What do you call art? 
• What, in your opinion, distinguishes your artwork from that of other artists?

Uriel Miron

A multi-awarded artist and sculptor born in Tel Aviv, Uriel Miron grew up in the US and Israel, where he permanently moved at the beginning of the 1990s. Miron’s works have been shown in many solo and group exhibitions in Israel and abroad, and they are in various collections, including those of the Israel Museum, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art. Miron has a broad education in art and literature (Yale University’s Literature Department; Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem; School of Visual Arts, New York) and is a professor of art at the Shenkar School of Multi-Disciplinary Art, and the Shenkar School of Design in Tel Aviv.

All of the above might not have happened if not for the artist’s most crucial experience – a visit to the Natural History Museum in New York at the age of four. That experience, combined with exposure to the abstract art collected by his grandparents [grandmother Dvora Schocken owned a gallery], were the foundations for his future art.

Throughout his career, he has remained faithful to his interest in zoology, skeletons, bone structures, and the nature of movement (for instance, in his exhibitions “Momento Mobili” in 2010,” and in “Come Crawling” in 2021). Miron continues to explore these subjects in his new show “Carved at the Joints” at Chelouche Gallery in Tel Aviv-Yaffo, where he presents sculptures in his beloved material – wood. They are “very clean” and full of expression at the same time.

INSPIRATION: 

“The thing that inspires me most is work. I think most of the best ideas are happening while you are working. You don’t need to have a really good idea to start with. I also don’t like to make something based on an idea; I want to change my mind all the time. So, most of the inspiration comes from working with the material. A lot of my works look like skeletons and bones – a lot of paleontology. I am inspired by zoology and forms in the animal world.”

MEANING OF ART: 

“Looking at art from a philosophical intellectual point of view, I agree with Thierry de Duve, Belgian curator and philosopher, who said that in any period, anything that is called art is art. He concluded that art is like names; they don’t mean anything until we have lived with them for some time.”

MIRON’S ARTWORK: 

“Art for me, in a more personal way, is something that you do because you have to. There has to be a very strong impulse. The choice of doing art usually involves a lot of hardship, not something that you can live off usually.

“It is very important to make art now. To try to have some kind of continuity. Between what was before [Oct. 7] and what is now.

 “I don’t work from a preconceived idea, which means that between the time when I start making a piece and I finally decide that it is finished (or it decides for me), I make a large number of decisions about its shape. I have some images at the beginning, but I believe that with the number of creative change decisions at every point of the work, the chances that it would be like anything that anybody else has made are very small. So, there is a method to being different. It is not about the originality of thought (not of having better ideas; I think everybody has ‘okay ideas’). The ideas are good if you work them through and if they change. That’s why I make everything myself.

“I have always thought of my work as images of creatures, even if they are completely invented and abstract.”

Instagram.com/urielmiron/

Dana Manor Cohen

This Israeli artist, recently serving as a reservist, began her adventure with art at age 13, studying at the studio of painter Rachel Avni in Karmiel, where she was born and raised. Manor Cohen has a background in animation (Animation Department, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem). Two years ago, her works were selected by the Fresh Paint art incubator.

As an adult, Manor Cohen moved to Kibbutz Tzivon, situated in an oak forest in Upper Galilee. She says she chose a simple life and the silence of nature. The artist enjoys waking up early before everyone else, walking around the kibbutz, and painting surrounded by nature. She paints landscapes in acrylic and oil on book covers she finds in the streets and on benches, giving them a new life. She also explores photography, drawing, and writing with charcoal: “I write on pages of old books. I write [about] people I love and places I’ve visited; small moments and memories. Like from a diary.” Manor Cohen’s art is very intimate.

The war has changed her life drastically. As many residents of northern Israel: “I had to leave my home and join the reserve forces,” she says. However, despite the war, she has been very active in the art scene over the past months. She had a solo exhibition “My Dearest Hill” at the Artists House in Rishon Lezion; took part in the group exhibition “Anima Mundi” at Teo – Art and Culture Center in Herzliya; and now her art is on display in the group exhibition “Behind the Mask,” presented at the Museum of Italian Jewry as part of the Jerusalem Bienniale.

INSPIRATION:

“My creative process focuses on observing the here and now. I look for the tiniest moments of movement and changes over time. Looking at the clouds and the changing colors reminds me of the freedom of change and movement. The healing green, nature above all always continues. I am moved by special colorful book covers that keep in their contents a memory of something ancient; someone once read them, kept them, and now I collect them and give them renewed relevance. In the same way, old photos of my loved ones; memories from the past are given a new place and meaning in a new context in the ongoing present.”

MEANING OF ART: 

“Art for me is supposed to inspire, to activate an emotion of any kind. Good art for me stays in my heart and thoughts, even when I’m not around [it].”

MANOR COHEN’S ARTWORK: 

“In my works, I don’t concentrate on the completeness of the image, I deal with what I feel towards it. As part of my process of documentation and visual creation, I also engage in photography. I created a series of ‘selfies’ of my landscape paintings set against the scenes they depict, creating a visual connection between mediums. The drawing process allows me to focus on specific tiny elements I collect from nature, such as rare bird feathers, stones, and acorns, as well as ready-made objects I find to be enchanted. I also use photos of my children and my partner. I pick mostly childhood moments that I am fascinated by and draw them as well, creating my interpretations of past times, long gone.”

This interview with Dana Manor Cohen was conducted remotely [via remote access] due to her military service. She has kept up with her drawing to help her through the hard times, she says.

Instagram.com/dana.joz.painter/

Nurit David

Nurit David, who lives and works in Tel Aviv, is an artist, writer, and teacher. She studied art at HaMidrasha Art School, Art Teachers’ Training College (today, Beit Berl College) in Ramat Hasharon, where she also lectured since 1986 for over 20 years. In 2002-2006, she taught at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem.

The multiply awarded artist is a very energetic person, and this is reflected in her art. “Her paintings are vivid and rich, and she integrates a variety of painting styles on the same canvas, with touches of Oriental art on the one hand and pop art on the other” (from the laudation of The Rappaport Prize for Established Israeli Artists). Also essential in her work is the dialog between words and visuals.

David’s works are in the collections of the major museums in Israel and The Jewish Museum of New York. She has had numerous solo shows, including exhibitions at The Israel Museum, Herzliya Museum, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Since 1982, David has been represented by Givon Art Gallery, where she now presents her newest show, “Tomb.”

INSPIRATION: 

“In Hebrew, ‘inspiration’ is hashra’a, and harsha’a is ‘permission.’ Sources for work can be found all around us in the real world and culture. For me, the question is which of these sources I am permitted to use – and first and foremost are those which I’ve already used in the past. My current exhibition ‘Tomb’ is based on a relief from 1985 titled Nile. Child, Man, Effigy. It was inspired by James Joyce’s [novel] Ulysses and my own story ‘The Back Side of the Nile,’ which accompanies the exhibition. I wrote there: ‘In reading [Thomas Mann’s] Joseph and His Brothers, I felt as if the short sentence from Ulysses was only the entrance key, given to me then to the enormous palace of Mann, which I’ve entered now. It’s as though Mann took those short paragraphs with the words of the Egyptian priest and extracted three fat volumes out of them.’ Inspiration is all about chains of thought passing on through culture.”

MEANING OF ART: 

“I’ll also answer with a quote from one of my stories ‘The Back Side of the Nile’: ‘In my humble opinion, I said, raising my voice on purpose, more than enough years of life were given, and in any case, anyone who doesn’t exchange life for work is considered to never have lived. One who is unable to show the produce of his hands at the end of the day is seen as someone who lets life slip like sand through his fingers. And the most wonderful work of all is the work in art, and, yes, I mean work as labor and work as worship. The Egyptians, as I see it, understood better than any nation the concept of substitution, the freedom, and necessity of a twin life.’”

DAVID’S ARTWORK: 

“Instead of style or talent for painting, I developed a dubious mechanism of hanging or throwing the whole weight of my existence into art. And at the same time producing art from what I would hesitantly call ‘the story of my life.’ It’s a kind of acrobatics or an act of deceit (collecting money based on nonexistent capital): me as a person whose fundamental existential sense is that of ‘being empty,’ ‘nonexistent,’ ‘having no story,’ direct my gaze into this emptiness and turn it to my subject matter, give it a shape, albeit an awkward and meager one, by which it (the emptiness) becomes an entity, and from this fictitious fullness I gain some sense of existence and so forth.

“Self-consciousness becomes my tool by which, through the work of art, I extract a sediment of existence.”

nuritdavid.com/ 