The road to Tzippori is full of promise: open spaces reaching out to the horizon, where heaven and earth meet; a local landscape; a haven of peace which envelops me in tranquillity; the sense of time standing still in the midst of a noisy, tumultuous world, filled with anxieties, hate and destruction; a varied landscape of cypresses and thorny arms of Sabra, extending over a countryside of wavy hills.

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I was captivated by Tzippori’s charms, and found myself returning to its beauties at different times within each season, until it became the focal point of this series of oil paintings – a body of work which crystallised during the last two years.

I was particularly impressed by the habitat of Tzippori’s trees: the cypress acted upon me on different levels of sensuous experience – in the refreshing smell it bestowed upon me, and in presenting me with its texture, its outline of interlocked leaves, clinging to each other like scales to form a vigorous tree, aspiring ever upwards in its proud nobility; while the Sabra, rising over the ground, aroused ambivalent sensations in me: rugged and threatening, yet concealing within its thorns a hidden sweetness. The sensuous experience evoked a wealth of associations, a richly-imaginative world which materialised into a varied body of sketches, impressions and photographs. This harvest of local beauty formed the foundation for the current body of works.

The landscape, with its blending of the hidden and the revealed, opens the gates towards a wondrous, imaginative world, and dissociates one from an objective perception of reality, transferring one into the world of magic, thus creating layers of a colourful reality, in which the theme undergoes a constant process of variations. This emotional state motivates a creative urge, inspiring one to paraphrase the subject, while constantly seeking the formation of a pictorial balance between the miraculous world of imagination and the world of reality.

This contact with the objects and their surroundings created, for me, an experience of harmony with nature; it stirred within me an intense sense of wonder and joie de vivre inspired by the location’s authentic character, the meeting-place of past and present, of the ancient and the contemporary.