A Shadow Is a Promise

How does a book come into the world?
I am a painter, but it was important for me to also present my drawings in my exhibition within the group show So Much So, at Gabirol Gallery in 2018, which this book refers to. Since then, I’ve been very engaged with how paintings function when they are installed in a specific space, and I couldn’t really imagine a proper way for my drawings to be shown. I didn’t want them to be hung as artworks usually are in museum spaces, and more than anything, it was important for me that each of them be experienced on their own. I wanted the comparison between the drawings to exist only in the viewer’s memory and reduce the simultaneous viewing experience that one usually has when encountering artworks in the gallery setting. This desire connected to the creation of this book, which is a lot like a sketchbook, and it was published in parallel to the exhibition.

What could viewers see in the exhibition space? 

There were the paintings, some of which hung from the ceiling; one of them was placed on the floor propped up on river stones. In retrospect, I think that the installation was very connected to the book. Both in the installation and in the book, I was trying to play with the notion of weights, of placing something light next to something heavy. Like the air that blows under or behind the page of a book. I was interested at the time in drawing things that looked like they were subordinate to the rules of physics. If something appeared to be standing, then it had to have a leg that seemed to touch the floor. Even if it wasn’t entirely clear what “it” was, I wanted the things appearing in my drawings to look like they could exist in reality.

That’s the effect created by voluminosity, but a lot of the drawings in your book seem to defy the principle of volume. That connects well to the beautiful title of your book, “A Shadow Is a Promise.” This title is phrased like a personal motto. Is a shadow really just a promise?
A shadow transforms a thing into something real, but not everything in the book has a shadow. Sometimes it has just a leg, or a chain. I’m not trying to create a fantasy, but rather the feeling that they could be of this world. Take shade nets—this is an object I spent a long time studying. If I imagine that something stands on the floor, it just as well could hang from the ceiling.

The word “Is” in the title of your book seems to underscore the existence of the shadow. This corresponds well with what you said about your aspiration to draw things that are “of this world” – that a shadow, too, is a physical phenomenon in our world.
I had a hard time translating the title of my book into English. I was deliberating for a long time on whether I should include that first “A” in “A Shadow Is A Promise.” I don’t like naming my works, and even when I do it’s because I have to. So the names are usually very descriptive. For example, “Green” is a painting in which I used two shades of green. And here I couldn’t really pull off something like that. Eventually, the title of the book just came.

How did you decide on the size of the book?
The drawings are from various sketchbooks that are all about the same size. I didn't want to enlarge my drawings, so we stuck with a size that resembled the size of my sketchbooks.

It’s a radical decision not to include any text, neither in the book nor in the actual drawings.
Adding text to an artist's book is the most tempting, but I feel that this is a bit like when artists create a video work for an exhibition and then they include an object that appeared in it inside the exhibition space because they think they have to. Words can be very restrictive, and I had had enough dealing with the book's title. A line doesn't have the same meaning as words do. And even if the images in the book might remind you of something, most of them are not representations of specific things.

You also didn’t include work titles or an index.
It didn’t even occur to me to do that. Viewers work with the images they see. When there’s a text, our gaze will always drift over to it, to try and figure out what something is by its title. Our brains are conditioned to do that. I like to think that the readers accept the book in the same way that I accept a drawing on paper. There is something very liberating about this way of thinking. 

How did you start painting? 

In life?

Yes.
Oh, wow. That’s a funny question. Everyone paints at one point in life, and at another point, everyone stops painting, except for those who continue. I’m not making a hippie statement here. When we are children in kindergarten, that’s what we do, we all paint. The only difference is that I just kept going. It started getting serious when I was a teenager, which is the period in life when things start to get serious. I don’t know what else to say about it. Maybe just that I really love painting. Is this going to be embarrassing for me to read later?

I hope not. What do you love about painting? 

I just love it so much. I think that painting is the hardest and most challenging artistic medium. Not because of the competition, but because it carries a lot of history on its back. Photography is also often compared to painting. At the end of the day, everything leads back to painting, to the line. I have a lot of moments in the studio, when I think about what I’m doing in this life, and I tell myself: “I just smear color on stuff. I’m in the studio, I’m working, but actually what I’m doing is smearing colors.” But that act of smearing colors has so much meaning. Oh, this is coming out dramatic.

I would tell you if it was too dramatic.
There are a lot of loose ends I need to tie up in my head. For instance, I’m interested in paintings that refer to concrete experiences. Mostly sensory experiences, such as what it would feel like to touch this table right now. I’m interested in translating that sensation into a painting, and then how that would affect a person coming to see my show. I’m interested in the influence painting has over people’s sensitivities. And I also really want people to touch my works. I had a lot of works that were made of plaster, and part of what they were all about was their breakability and erosion. When I presented these works in my graduate show at Bezalel, they were dragged across the hallways , and parts of them were lost along the way. There is something very liberating about that. But I prefer to destroy my own works, because if someone else does it I would probably get upset. 

Did anyone ever destroy your work? 

Not really, but in my graduate show there was an incident that I still remember. I had placed a golden tray behind one of my works. A little girl passed by, and I saw her running in the direction of the tray, looking left and right, touching it and then running away. That was very cool.

You call yourself a painter, but what kind of relationship do you have with drawing as a medium and method of work?
My drawings are usually created at home, when I feel a twitch in my fingers, in my nerve-endings. It took me a while to get used to this state of mind; during my studies, I really suffered in the drawing classes. I create my paintings in my studio, because I need a space where I can get messy, and I can’t really do that at home. It would be like trying to cook while wearing your best clothes. What’s fun about drawing is that you can just turn the page over and make a new one. For me it’s associated with sacred “do not touch the artwork.” Books are also deemed sacred, but the original idea of the invention of printing was that if a book is ruined, you can make a copy. Books are actually objects that are regarded culturally in a manner that is the opposite of what they ought to have been from a historical standpoint. This resembles how I perceive my artworks. In this context, I would call the book “an exhibition object.” It’s like a sketchbook, something you should be able to destroy.

The type of paper you selected – matte – is also reminiscent of the kind of paper often used in sketchbooks.
That was the thought behind it. We also did a color scan of the pencil I used, so all of its tones could be seen in print. We did a mockup before printing the book, which is how I learned what a mockup was. I loved how there wasn’t much difference between the page of a notebook sketchbook and a page in the book.

Was there anything difficult about making this book?
For me it was especially difficult, because I usually finish works quickly, and making a book is quite a drawn out process. I worked with the designer Ran Ben Ezra, who is very organized. We have very different temperaments, but I knew he was right in all the decisions he made. We decided together on the order in which the drawings appear, but that was rough for me because I hate having to choose. In general, it’s hard for me to work with a team because I’m used to working alone.

When we collected the book from the printer, I opened a box and at the top there was a single copy. When I opened it, all of the drawings were printed upside down. I started crying and muttering to myself: ‘I don’t have any money to print this book again. My grandmother gave me money to help me produce this book, it received so much support.’ I wanted to burn the box. We had no idea what to do next. After half an hour, we decided to look inside the box and only then did we realize that the copy I had looked at was the only one that had come out wrong. It was like an awful prank. When you work in a team there are a lot of things that are simply out of your control.

Just before we started this interview, you told me that you feel disconnected from the book. Why is that?  

When I finished with the printing of the book, I was gratified on a concrete level because I had created a new object. But very quickly it stopped holding my attention, because I always move on to the next thing. Unlike my other works, which are at my studio and which I see a lot, the book is closed. It took on the status of a postcard. Now I don’t even remember what’s in it, except for the pink drawing, because it’s so pink. 

How was the book received? 

There were copies of it at the exhibition, and I also presented it at the In Print artits's book fair in Jerusalem’s Hansen House. Compared to the other books at the fair, I felt that my book was small and subtle. I got a lot of great reviews, which surprised me. You create something and you release it into the world, and you have no idea how people will react to it. So it was fun. And I was also told that the book format was very fitting for my works. As you know, there isn’t much of a market in Israel for artist's books dedicated to drawing or painting.

That has to do with the status of visual arts nowadays, especially in Israel.
Yes, and it’s really a shame because there is something about painting that is so basic to the human experience, and a book is a format that gives this experience the space it requires. I’m not interested in the reactions of people who claim to know a lot about painting. Often people who see art feel either that they have to offer an opinion about it or they don’t have the right to express their opinion. The intellectualization of the viewing experience, how much they understand or don’t, takes away from the sensory experience, which is what I’m truly interested in.  

Creating a book is like…

Preparing something for someone. It’s a bit like preparing clues for a treasure hunt, but without necessarily having a treasure at the end. In the kibbutz where I grew up, we used to call it “The Arrow Game.” You create one arrow, and then another.

Now that you mention it, I realize that there really is an arrow in your book.
Right, it’s not one of the drawings! It took Ran and me quite some time to realize that we needed the arrow there. There were drawings I had created which were supposed to be presented in the book horizontally, and I didn’t want to turn them over because I assign a lot of meaning to how they are positioned on the pages. We ended up including them at the end of the book and then added a page that has only an arrow, with the hope that readers will understand that they need to turn the book and look at the drawings horizontally. I don’t know if anyone actually got it, but it’s there. See, I let you in on a secret.  

That’s lovely. And I think it corresponds with your decision not to include an image on the cover.
I didn’t want there to be a single lead image. Instead, we created a red gradient on the cover. It’s not a must to always prioritize a single work or image over others.

What book should we add next to our library?
You should invite Tal Yerushalmi to talk about her work. She’s a painter I really love. I admire her works, I kind of wish I could bite into them.

Where can readers get a copy of your book?
At Hamigdalor bookstore, Magazine ||| Jaffa Books, and on my website.