Artist Michael Ben Abu has been creating unique notebooks and artist’s books for a decade. His private archive now holds more than 100 notebooks. This year, his first printed artist’s book, Simple Steps, was released in a limited edition. To mark the publication, Ben Abu shares his practice and the central role these notebooks play in his work. Selected notebooks from the collection have been added to the Madaf index and are now available to view on the website.
“Your heart hurts, but it will not break.
Slowly, the faded images erase themselves,
and then the flaws are erased.
After that comes the sun at midnight.
You remember even the dark flowers —
You would have liked to be dead, or alive, or someone else.”
-- Dahlia Ravikovitch
For as long as I can remember, I have been reading. As a child, books were my refuge from the harsh realities of the world. They were also my source of knowledge and education. I was a bookworm, devouring hundreds—perhaps thousands—of stories. At night, I read by candlelight so as not to disturb my five siblings, with whom I shared a single room.
I have always loved writing. Over the years, I wrote journals, short stories, and poems. But only at the age of forty did I suddenly begin to paint—one day, without warning—and I never stopped. I create continuously, across media and forms. Initially, I worked as an autodidact, an outsider or art brut artist, until I realized that I needed to study art formally. At fifty, I enrolled in the BFA program at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, and completed my degree at fifty-five.
With the beginning of my studies, I started working in sketchbooks—drawing within them, but also writing them as journals. Over time, the books evolved into a parallel and significant artistic format. Each sketchbook is a self-contained artwork: an installation of symbolic, mythological, and theological traces that form my own microcosm. As an artist working in Hebrew, Jewish sources—mysticism, Kabbalah, and sacred text—touch and shape my daily life, and are present in these pages.
Artist's Notebook, 2015.
Every day I write automatic text. Alongside the writing, I work inside the book: drawing, collaging, painting, mapping, erasing—erasing a lot. Each book has its own internal logic: watercolor, acrylic, a fixed palette (perhaps only red and gold), a single repeated word, or a recurring image: a dolphin, a rose. Often, the cover itself dictates the tempo, mood, and frequency at which the book unfolds.
Artist's Notebook, 2014.
One off notebook.
Because of this late discovery, I became a compulsive collector of blank books—journals, notebooks, sketchbooks—waiting to become works. I call them by different names: travel books, night journals, life journals, and more. Some contain fragments and traces: maps, restaurant napkins, museum tickets, bus passes, boarding passes. The book becomes both an internal and external map—mental geography.
In some sense, the process has only just begun. Parallel to the vast library around me—written by others—another library grows: a private archive of notebooks that store research, transformation, and the evolution of my practice. Occasionally, materials from the notebooks become books shared with the public.
One-Off Artist's book.
Such is the book Simple Steps. The notebook Simple Steps was completed in 2019. After closing it, I scanned and enlarged it to match the original scale, producing a printed edition of 250 copies ahead of my exhibition Ishmila at The Lab, Tel Aviv, curated by Sharon Toval (2025).
Across most pages, a human figure appears—caught in a gesture between falling and self-protection. It floats and shifts through the book, surrounded by text and drawing. The written becomes visual; the image becomes language. Emotion moves through impulse and necessity.
A Diary in Titles - A Personal Journey.
Simple Steps eventually became the first chapter in a trilogy—an artist’s book in three manifestations: the original notebook, a printed edition, and a single copy enlarged to a monumental scale. Together they form a movement between big and small, singular and multiplied—between the deeply intimate and what is offered publicly to all.
Michael Ben Abu (b. 1959, Israel) is a multidisciplinary artist and poet based in Tel Aviv. He graduated from the Department of Art at Bezalel in 2015 and holds a Master’s degree in Jewish Studies from the Schechter Institute. He is a teacher of transcendental meditation, an aura reader, healer, and alternative therapist. He has held solo exhibitions in Israel and abroad, and has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Eretz Israel Museum and the Mishkan Museum of Art in Ein Harod. His short films have been screened at festivals around the world and have won numerous awards. His works are in private and institutional collections, including the Israeli Knesset collection.
