OTHER FEATURED ARTISTS
Baruch Nachshon of Hevron. His canvasses express a yearning for fulfillment & re-demption in the spirit of Judaism's ancient traditions. "The Jewish past has been well-represented in art," he says, but no one has represented the future Messianic Age." MORE
Eliyah Succot of Jerusalem was inspired by the beauty of the Galil & the holiness of Eretz Yisrael. At the end of the Yom Kippur War, his paintings became more & more charged with prayers for the final redemption - praying, dancing figures, the Torah, revelations of inner & outer light, the land & the sky of Israel, amidst bright pastel colors imbued with great hope and promise. Now, in Jerusalem he balances his time - nights and parts of his days immersed in Torah study in a Yeshiva minutes from the Holy Wall & each day carving out time to work on his paintings." MORE
Yaacov Kaszemacher French-born son of Polish parents. "I was raised in a secular home in post-war Paris. I frequented small nightclubs and associated with the musicians, artists, and philosophers of the beat generation and then the flower children.
Essentially self-taught, I learned about art by experimenting with different mediums and techniques. My personal style quickly evolved: bold colors, hard-edge, constructionist; expressing mathematical and mystical themes.
After a spiritual awakening in 1971, I immigrated to Israel, and made the transition from hippie to Torah-observant Hassid. I added kabbalistic and Jewish content to my work, which became a meditative support. Each design has multi-layered religious significance. Many of my pieces are circular or concentric and can actually be used as mandalas - mystical circles painted as visual stimulation for meditation. I want each person to discover his own meaning.
While my geometric art is intellectual, combining the universal wisdom of geometry with the numerical concepts in Torah, my photography is emotional, capturing images and evoking feelings about Israel, Zefat, Jewish, Israeli and Hassidic life. Photography is an opportunity to freeze memories and impressions. Photographs are a great means for instant communication of mood, emotion and statement.
I want to portray the eternal aspects of current religious Jewish life. My pictures exclude contemporary objects and leave the viewer with an uncertainty as to when the photograph was executed, now or in a bygone era before the war. Thus we see the timelessness of the Torah life and the continuation of a living, vital and vibrant community."
Kabbalah is the various teachings dealing with Jewish mysticism, its prime source being the Sefer HaZohar, the Book of Splendor, based on the teachings of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochi, who lived in the First Century.
The common translation of the word Kabbalah is "receiving", implying that the teachings were originally and are still best transmitted from master to disciple. Another interesting meaning from the same Hebrew root word is to "find parallels" or analogues between the dimensions of space, time and soul.
Kabbalah and Art may seem to be contradictory, because of Judaism's long iconoclastic tradition, the only art tolerated being the artisanship of ritual objects, such as candelabra and spice boxes. However, the text of Zohar, is very stimulating visually, always enjoining the reader "to come and see" (as opposed to the Talmud, which states "it was heard") and can help the artist who studies it seriously to attain an expansive conciousness for creating inspired work.