Israel (WIP) and a Call for Participation in an Art Project

Israel (acrylic and sand on canvas 100×120 cm, still WIP)

For the call for participation in an art project aimed at a better understanding please scroll down to the end of this post. Thank you.

This is what I am working on right now (if a very bad sore throat hadn’t sent me to bed early today). I am sorry that the picture is a bit fussy. Yet, you can still see that I colored the sky already and the sand with the shadow of the beach chair. And you can see the pencil outline of what will soon be the beach chair image. All in all, the new pic is about the image of Israel I have in my mind.

 

Do you know this kind of beach chairs that were invited at the beaches of the Baltic Sea? They are quite sturdy and protect you against all kinds of influences – rain and sun, heavy winds, sandy feet and curious eyes. They are comfortable in their own way, invite for a pause and offer room for storage. But they are as well pretty inflexible and too heavy to move around all the time to adjust them to the fast changing circumstances.

 

The image of such a beach chair I drew is slightly adjusted to the Mediterranean climate. It’s made of wood and not of reed and the fabric will be of lighter colors. But you can still see where the original idea came from.

 

The chair is situated in a beautiful surrounding. The bright, sunny sky and the white sand bring along an air of peace and eternity. The image of the palm tree in the chair as a symbol of a tree of life add to the feel of eternity. Leaves of the palm tree have been chopped of during past time. But this made the trunk only more sturdy. From the heart of the trunk new green grows and the leaves fill every angle of the Israeli world past and present.   

 

But the chair, meant to be a protection by itself, needs to be heavily protected by walls and barbwire. Even these measures can’t prevent the constant pinpricks of Qassam rockets, attacking the nerves of the inhabitants, their property, their health and their lives. If you add the cruelty of suicide bombs and bombs you might have found the reason for the preponderance of military, aggressive thoughts that throw dark shadows onto the paradise. But these shadows are, what the world looks at first as they become darker.

 

OK, this rounds up some of my ideas that brought me to draw this picture exactly as I do. While I do the manual work of giving my thoughts a shape my brain is already working on the next ideas for pictures to ‘One King’s Children’. In my last post I already published the text ‘Dear Mr. PM-To-Be’ I will use for another canvas that will feature as a background the cover of my Israeli passport. For the exhibition/ public reading I will also add a self portrait of me/ Lea.

 

Yet, for what I plan now to be the main piece I want to invite you all to help me. ‘One King’s Children’ has many messages one should think about. But one of the main messages is that it is much harder to live aggressive, inhuman, xenophobic ideas if you can put a normal, perhaps even lovely, loving face to the people on the other side. You think twice if you can lump together and generalize if you have some kind of connection to those affected by the lumping together.

 

Hence, with the Love Letter Building we once had here in Berlin in mind, I want to create a wall of “people you used to hate until you got around to know them” featuring handwritten letters and/ or small artwork (pictures, photos, knitting etc.) giving the common Israeli, Palestinian, Jew or Arab in particular but if you want to the English, American, German, French or whatever you are in general a face and a meaning.

 

All I ask for is a small handwritten message in English (as I and everyone who will see it must be able to know what it says and (bad) English is the language spoken by most in the world) about one thing you think you are. At the end of ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ they say something along the lines: some people are born to be mothers, some people are born to know everything about buttons, some people are born to create clocks… So, what are you born to be? What represents you best?

 

I want only small things you can send me by normal mail as I hope for many people to participate. So if you read this and like the idea, send the message out to your friends inviting them to take part as well. And don’t forget to drop me a line so that I can give you further instructions as where to send your letter.

Tags: art, art project, call for participation, Israel, Knitting, letters, One King's Children, painting, politics, WIP, work in progress