Landscape as Consolation

Five Views, 2012-2013, oil on canvas, 32 X 160 cm each

Mourning post no. 1
December 2016

After my father passed away last June, I felt that I couldn’t yet resume the painting that I had begun beforehand.

Sitting outside one evening just before sunset I looked out at the landscape and realized what I needed to paint and draw. Thus a sixth view joined Five Views from 2013.

Painting and drawing the landscape this past summer became a sort of consolation. I think that the beauty of it is part of the story, but a greater one is the constant change that one must find a way to contain in the work. I chose to look at the slope across from my studio balcony at the time of day in which the light transforms the colors of the landscape, as they intensify and then fade, all within less than one hour. Accepting that change, painting along with it, seemed to heal my grief in some way, or at least provide moments of joy within it.

There is an opposite reaction to nature when faced with loss, which I have also experienced, in which its beauty as well as its cyclical continuity, so indifferent to our lives and feelings, feel like an affront. A similar sentiment is expressed in the Hebrew song which asks how it is possible that The Wheat Grows Again? As a matter of fact, I remember trying to capture that feeling in a painting long destroyed, which I had entitled The Sin of the Landscape. But this time is different – landscape as consolation.