about the artist
This painting depicts my grandmother Jenny beckoning the spirit of Shabbat to her with her hands, and covering her eyes as is traditional when lighting Friday Shabbot candles. My orthodox immigrant grandparents lived on Flatbush in Brooklyn (previously of Poland and Berlin). Their families, my ancestors, were mostly killed in the Holocaust. There is a pink shadowy figure in the foreground representing "the Neshamah" or extra Shabbos soul, and a tiny Shabbos angel flying around. There is a green hanging oil lamp that was used so that one would not have to turn on a light switch during Shabbos. There is a black velvet painting in the left corner which is one of the few heirlooms I have from my grandmother's life in Poland; she had a sister who painted on velvet. The orthodox man in the photo was my great grandfather who never came to America.
This piece is part of a series of paintings titled Midrash, a Jewish term meant for the stories that are told about portions of the Hebrew bible that are ambiguous, not fully clear, and open to interpretation. It has been a Jewish practice for centuries for both the scholar and the lay person to invent Midrash or stories to help understand ourselves in the present and the past. The paintings in this series are inspired by Jewish blessings, prayers, rituals, and family stories.
My paintings began to express contemporary Jewish content in the mid-90’s after moving from NY/Boston, where I had grown up, to Memphis, the “Buckle of the Bible Belt.” In the South I felt a deep need to connect, claim, grapple with, and make relevant my eastern European Jewish cultural identity and religion. I felt a responsibility to refer to it whether abstractly or directly in my art. As a painter, Jewish sources including blessings, meditations, and stories have become a vast mine of inspiration for me. I hope to be a visual voice that can resonate with my post-holocaust, post immigrant generation, both secular and/or religious.
