אדריכלות ישראלית - גיליון 125

2021 מאי 125 אדריכלות מצוירת אדריכלות ישראלית 87 | | painted architecture shulamit near - god is in the light Bonnie Evans "At the age of two and a half we returned, I was dancing the twist and already had a chronic longing for big cities - always living between the two cultures - two worlds. When I was in kindergarten, they told me that if I ate carrots, I'd see much better. So I would eat carrots and run fast behind the kindergarten to try and see through the wall. When I was 11, I painted the sky during an art lesson on the kibbutz. The teacher looked and said - there is no such sky. And I said - there is, I see it. One of the characters who most influenced me as a child was Mary Poppins. Especially the moment she, Bert and the children jumped into the paintings. In my heart, I decided that if one day I became a painter, I’d strive to make people feel like jumping into my paintings. The urge for research that I inherited from my father and creative mother, together with my insistence on seeing and better understanding the blue sky and the red, glowing roof, introduced me to the Golden Ratio, which became a foundation of my painting world. At the age of 24, I was accepted to Bezalel. In Jerusalem I met a man, love, and deserted painting. We made jewelry, selling it on the street and at festivals; we even built a jewelry shop business together. But, later on, I realized that painting was the air I breathed and I left everything to return to painting. I went to study painting in London - an antithesis to Bezalel. I painted in Jerusalem for 15 years, but in the last eight years, I've returned to the landscapes of my childhood in Beit HaEmek. I paint through observation. Observing everything that moves, breathes, and changes. "See what the sun does to the world", is a sentence I say a lot when it comes to painting. The almost blinding light of Israel is strong and unique: light that falls on a house, a person, or an object - turns reality, as I see it, into a mysterious maze of shapes and colors. Relative to other places, the sun moves at excessive speed here. If in New York, it takes the sun four hours to set, here the sun falls into the water in ten minutes. The reality in which the world revolves while I stand in one place, painting - with the light on the object of my painting rapidly changing - allows me to create a painting out of moments of light. I usually paint outside, returning again and again, in the same season, to the same point where the painting was born. In contrast to fast, immediate photography, I slowly capture the moments of light, the way the sun changes the landscape, the details embedded in it and the expressions on people's faces. I try and preserve the inner nature of the landscapes and figures, filtering out any historical, political or cultural considerations. I admit that I make up lot of things in my painting - it's a necessary part of my creative freedom. My paintings look completely realistic, but I often make buildings disappear, plant trees, suspend balconies; change the route of a road, hang washing and clean up a neighborhood. The space in my painting is necessarily an illusion. While the canvas is two- dimensional, reality has at least three dimensions. All my landscapes witness Man’s products – houses and buildings, ploughed fields and antennas on a roof. While architecture manifests real life, the canvas is a space intended to embody the visual and emotional experience. I move and create on the seam between the two. The beauty of architecture in my eyes expresses random and fascinating human thought - a wonderful reason to paint. Shulamit was born on Kibbutz Beit HaEmek to British, Zionist parents. Her father, Prof. Henry Near - was a Kibbutz Movement historian, a lecturer at the Haifa University and Seminar Oranim and an important researcher of Kibbutz society. Her mother, Aliza, was the kibbutz bookkeeper whose creative side was expressed mostly in knitting, gardening and Puppet Theater, which she did in her youth. When Shulamit was two months old, her parents were sent on a mission to England.