For me it all begun with photography. In the early 1990s I studied photography at Camera Obscura and later at the Ramat Hasharon Art College. As a beginner I got my mom's old Contaflex. The light meter was broken and of course it was impossible to change lenses, but that's how my eye learned to evaluate the light measurement and what would go into the frame, accurately. I started seeing "frames" even without the camera. There is something very creative in this way of looking at the world. Photographer Edward Weston said that good composition is simply the most powerful way to see. He was right.
20 years later, when I started freestyle painting, I did not see the connection between the two. To some extent I even felt a little rebellious. For the first time I stood up to paint in front of canvas, not looking at neither still life, nor model nor landscape. For the first time I closed my eyes to see. For the first time (as an adult ..) I played with color.
To a bystander it seems simple. What can be so complicated about smearing some paint? But the more you experience it, the more you understand the complexity of this thing. Countless decisions and choices to be made during one painting. But there are all sorts of ways to summon liberation and freedom in creation. One of them is re-framing.
I paint on a large sheet of paper. Lines in pencil, charcoal or pastel. Such and other paint stains, with a brush, with a spatula or with any other tool available. Thin paint and thick paint, transparent paint and opaque paint, soft brush strokes and other powerful ones. And plays. I do not think. Do not examine. Do not judge. Just having fun.
After the paint dries comes the exciting part!
I take a paper-frame and choose sections that I like from the painting. There is no limit of direction or of angle. Everything is possible. The actual cutting and framing - does the magic!
This experience takes me back to the special way of seeing, Weston was talking about. That's exactly what we do in photography, isn't it? We frame segments of reality. We create compositions (which are the relationships between the details and the frame, and also between the various details within the frame).
There is something exciting about realising how milestones in our lives suddenly connect, in a way we have not seen before.
The composition is a selective improvisation - Igor Stravinsky. (When you get over the complicated words you realize how accurate they are 😊)