The artist is entwined in me like a scarlet thread

 

I have always drawn and painted; it was my favorite mode of self expression. I started to draw at age of 5 without any guidance or pressure. I drew only because I wanted to and I have never stopped.

 

I discovered oil paints at the age of nine, when I went to buy tubes of gouache paint that I was short of. When I got back to the paper and started to paint, I found that one paint dispersed oil around it and the others formed water bubbles on it, and that it did not dry quickly and could be further smeared and worked with. I quickly purchased more paints like this and then I was told that they did not dissolve in water.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thus I discovered on my own the potential of paints that are slow to dry, allowing me to mix and lace one paint into another, forming blends and softness. Many years later, when I read about how to work with oil paints, there was little that I didn’t already know. I continued to paint throughout my youth and after I was discharged from the military I had a solo exhibition at the Soldier’s Hostel in Tel Aviv.

 

Painting has been threaded throughout my adult years, too. During my architecture studies at the Technion, I painted incessantly and won first prize in a painting competition of held among Technion and University of Haifa students during my first academic year.

 

Upon concluding my professional training as an architect, I continued to exhibit at various venues. In 1991 I also spent about two months at an academy in Vienna with the great painter Erich Brauer, where I painted intensively in the Fantastic Realism style.