art

Dancing Dogwood Flowers

Goache on paper, 2008

Art Show in Highland Park

Can anyone tell me how one can be in three places at once? This past Sunday there was a wonderful art show in Highland Park, which I missed because I was here and then at the tail end of the Cong. Etz Ahaim picnic.

Bill Bonner, an talented, artistic photographer and one of the exhibitors in the show sent me these photos that he took of the reception last Sunday:



Other artists in the show included my friend Jill Caporlingua, who has written posts on this blog and sometimes comments, my neighbor Mort Farrah, and my friend Rick Black. Sharon Sayegh, a painter I admire, also exhibited.

 For more Highland Park artists, see http://www.highlandparkartists.org

A Salad Lover’s Flower

Do like salads? Do you like elegant salads? Do you like the idea of being able to go to your backyard (or a container for plants, if you don’t have a backyard) and pick a pretty flower and round, green, tangy leaves to put in your salad?

In order to present to you nasturtium, the flower pictured in this watercolor, I wanted to show you a picture of this edible plant. Instead of showing a photograph, I decided to do a watercolor. When you paint, unlike in a photograph, you can choose what you want to present. So I decided to emphasize the flowers (which will become pretty petals of orange, yellow or red in your salad) and the round-shaped leaves.

The nasturtium seed looks like a shriveled chickpea. It grows easily: all you need to do is poke it with your finger into the ground. Don’t plant nasturtium where you have precious grass; the nasturtium plant will take over, and come frost time you’ll have a bare spot where you used to have grass. But I find it fairly easy to grow. The first summer I tried there was a drought in New Jersey, and these plants did not do well. But recently we’ve had a lot of rain, and my little germinated nasturtium plants are already sticking two round little leaves out of the ground.

More about nasturtium here.

Ruth and Public Domain Images

This artwork of Ruth and Boaz is by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, a German painter who lived from 1794-1872. It seems to be a study for an oil painting of Ruth in the Fields of Boaz.

This post is an introduction to a series of posts by Ilana-Davita and me on Ruth and the holiday of Shavuot. Read an introduction to Shavuot by Ilana-Davita.

And now, about public domain art: When is it OK to put up someone else’s art? When is it stealing?

Works of art that are from the 19th Century or earlier are, generally speaking, in the public domain. But your best bet is to go to a site like Wikimedia, and take art that declares that it is in the public domain or under a license that allows you to use it. For more recent images, you can use artwork or photos that are under a license such as GNU Free Documentation License.

There is also a concept called fair use. Fair use means you can use it for educational purposes but not for commercial purposes. So you could argue that you could use one of my paintings if you were trying to teach something.

But I got a better idea. If you want to use something that belongs to someone else, ask. It’s just common courtesy. And give credit back to the person to whom it belongs.

This is very simplified; if you want to study copyright law, you could come up with a much more complicated discussion on images and use on the web.

More about public domain art and reproductions here.

Mother of Boys

My newest watercolor.

I could have called this post “Mother of Jewish Boys” or “Mother of My Boys.” I still don’t have a name for the actual painting. I was thinking of putting a softball in this still-life, but neither of my boys play baseball anymore.

For those that would like some explanation, the four-cornered garment that Jewish boys and men wear is called tzitzit, as it says in Numbers 15:38, Parshat Sh’lach:

Speak unto the children of Israel, and bid them that they make them throughout their generations fringes in the corners of their garments

The blue book in the right corner is a prayer book, a siddur. That siddur happens to be the one many boys, including my boys, use in elementary school.

Teaching Kids Art

My daughter’s kindergarten class is doing a section on artists. So far, they have learned about Seurat, Jackson Pollack, Monet and Matisse. And they met the illustrator of Only Nine Chairs: A Tall Tale for Passover, who happens to be the grandmother of one of the kindergarten students.

Today, they met an artist who likes to do Jewish subjects: me.

First, I showed them my havdalah painting:

I asked them what they saw. They mentioned the candle, the cup, the plate. Then I asked them about the colors. What colors did they see on the cup? What colors do you see? Any idea why I put red next to green? I told them I was inspired by Rembrandt. Their teacher then pulled out the Night Watch (that’s not its real name, just its popular name), and I pointed out how the light and the angles of Rembrandt’s painting had similarities with mine.

Next I presented the four cups:

We talked about pointillism, and how the colors in this one differed from the previous painting. Besides the cups, what else is 4 in the hagaddah? The kids reminded me that there are four questions. But what I had in mind was the four sons. Why is one son separate from the others? They believed it was the “rasha”, the bad son. That wasn’t what I had in mind when I did the painting, but I let my viewers find their own interpretations.

They loved my final painting, a watercolor:

Not only is it someone they know well (my daughter), but the setting is their classroom.

Links: Israel, Art, Gas

Notable Links from the Internet:

The Best Overall:

• A Device That Could Save You Up To 60% On Your Gas Mileage
  (Anything to get us off “foreign” oil)

On Israel:

• Thank you, Harry Truman (see next post, too)
• Video: 191 paratroopers from 16 countries jump to salute Israel
  (ex-Highland Parker and Iraq War Veteran Yonatan Zagdanski jumps from a plane)

Art Links:

• Parshat Acharei Mot: Leviticus 16:10 Scapegoat by by William Holman Hunt
  וְהַשָּׂעִיר, אֲשֶׁר עָלָה עָלָיו הַגּוֹרָל לַעֲזָאזֵל, יָעֳמַד-חַי לִפְנֵי יְהוָה, לְכַפֵּר עָלָיו–לְשַׁלַּח אֹתוֹ לַעֲזָאזֵל הַמִּדְבָּרָה
  “But the goat, on which the lot fell for Azazel, shall be set alive before the LORD, to make atonement over him, to send him away for Azazel into the wilderness.”
  This a good example of a pre-Raphaelite school painting.
• Israel Broytman, painter

Famous Bloggers:

• Therapydoc is on CNN: Your blog can be group therapy

From this article:

Male bloggers tend to write about politics, technology and money; women are more likely to blog about their private lives and use an intimate style of writing.

At some point, I may do a post about women bloggers. Especially on how they deal with conflict. If anyone finds any relevant links, feel free to leave them in the comments. Or any of your own experiences with conflict and blogging. (Jack tried to help me find some a few weeks back, but the ones he sent me didn’t seem to fit my idea. Thanks for trying, Jack).

Garlic Spread Recipe

First, because this is a post for the wonderful Kosher Cooking Carnival, two watercolors:

Recently I posted about the health values of garlic. One quality of garlic is if you cook it, it loses much of its pungency and instead becomes sweet. I learned this recipe while standing online at our local Glatt 27(it is called 27 because it is on Rte. 27). The woman in front of me told me she makes this every Friday afternoon. Her kids like it so much they peel all the cloves. No such luck with my children; Eldest Son just looked over my shoulder at this post and called it evil.

Ingredients:

• One bulb of garlic, peeled
• Dried oregano (you could also use parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme or basil)
• Touch of salt to taste
• Broth or water

You need a little baking dish for this recipe. Here’s mine:

First, peel the whole bulb of garlic and put all the cloves in your baking dish. Cover with water (the woman on line uses chicken broth from her soup). Sprinkle with oregano and salt. Bake covered in the oven for about thirty minutes at 350° and mash with a fork. You can serve it in its baking dish.

I don’t like reheating it; it loses too much flavor. Serve as a spread for challah, matzah or crackers. Enjoy!

See photo of baked garlic spread

See larger version of garlic watercolors
Bonus question: which watercolor did I do first?

What do you see

An experimental painting: I like the energy, the colors, the spontaneity. However, it didn’t achieve the realism I wanted, so I am currently working on a more sedate version. Maybe later, if I succeed with my current painting, I will combine the energetic style with the realism in a third painting.

What do you see?

Ilana Shafir, artist, survivor

From sad portraits of Jews to intricate mosaics, Ilana Shafir has created many works of art. I had the pleasure of attending a Highland Park Arts Commission lecture Thursday night (thanks, Jill, for getting me out of the house) where Ilana spoke to a full audience.

Ilana was born in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. She always wanted to study art formally, but as a teenager there was no opportunity. Then the Nazis invaded. Her family managed to escape to a little village called Kula, where she drew portraits of the villagers. When asked how she managed to get art supplies during the war, she replied: “It was a miracle.” After the war, she studied at the Art Academy of Zagreb. In 1949 she made Aliyah (moved to Israel). She settled in Ashkelon, where she still lives today, with a garden full of her mosaics and her whimsical ceramic creatures.

In order to find models for her portraits in her early days in Israel, she went to the local “ma’abara” (transit camp) and created sketches, paintings and prints of the exotic (to her European eyes) residents from Yemen, North Africa, and other areas of the world where Jews had left to come to Israel. I was disappointed that these lovely portraits as well as earlier ones from her European days, which she showed us in her slide show, are not on her website.

At some point someone said to her: “Who is going to hang portraits of sad Jews in their museum?” Around the same time she developed an allergy to turpentine. At first she wore gloves, but this was not enough. She told us a funny aside, that on Purim, when the kids dressed up as artists in Ashkelon, they wore gloves!

Her art style switched to fantastic ink and watercolor paintings, ceramic creatures, and finally, the medium she loves the most, mosaic. She told us it takes 6-7 months for her to complete a mosaic. Talk about stamina and drive.

If you are in Ashkelon, her mosaics are on display in various public places, including a syngagogue, where her mosaic of Jerusalem has the names of family members who perished in the Holocaust and a “Z”, standing for the star Jews had to wear in Sarajevo during the war. Other Jewish themes are the Burning Bush (shown under her photo on this post) and the Tree of Life (with one tree on top of another, each generation has its roots in the former generation, she explained).

The presentation was an introduction by her daughter, a talk by Ilana with slide show, and a short movie by her son, Giora. Learn more: http://www.shafirart.com/