About The Within Series
I have come to realize that often our profession and the skills we learn throughout our lives influence the way we perceive the world. It might even affect the way we encounter life. For instance, physicians are more aware of their mortality than other people, and they perceive and understand the human body differently. Musicians develop a sharper sense of hearing. Radiologist specialists are capable of identifying between sixteen different shades of gray within seconds.
Visual artists, particularly the ones who are always working from observation, like I do, develop a high sense of vision. During the process of drawing from observation, one has to pay very close attention to the form of the objects, and deeply understand how the visual elements interact with each other to be able to translate as accurately as possible into the canvas the image that hits our retina, and not our interpretation of the image (Which is not the same). As a result, I feel very much enraptured by the beautiful surface of strawberries, the geometric perfection of a bundle of cigarettes, and I am prevalently abstracted and often distracted by the aesthetic appealing of objects that are part of my daily life.
Fortunately, during the time I was trying to write and research information to better understand my secret fixation about “vessels and fruits”. I came across with a research article by Stine Vogt, a psychology professor from Oslo University, who perfectly illustrated my issue with the limbo of light, colors, and shapes. The article explained that artists, especially visual artists who spend a lot of time painting and drawing from observation develop different eye scan patterns than non-artist individuals. Vogt stated: “Without learning to turn off the part of the brain that identifies objects, people can only draw icons of objects, rather than the objects themselves. When faced with a hat, for instance, most people sketch an archetypal side view of a hat, rather than the curves, colors, and shadows that hit their retina". ...in the other hand ‘artists’ special way of seeing translates into eye scan patterns that are markedly different from those of non-artists”
Consequently, and perhaps due to my "art educator nature" in which I always seek to pave the road between the audience (most of the time of non- connoisseurs) and the artwork; I decided to continue painting still-lives but depicting figures that are not contained in the fabric of reality.
The images are intended to look slightly familiar yet impossible to identify. As a result, the viewer is forced to observe, to inspect the artwork closer, and in this endeavor trying to decode the figures the people might find more accurate visual information on composition within the painting than if they were glimpsing at an acquainted object. So, the artwork does not lay on the painting itself, but on the force, I imbue in the spectator to “observe”. It lays on my pursuit of making the viewer experience the visual world almost like I do.
