Monastic Artist:
These works were created following an encounter with the work of Fra Angelico, an early Renaissance artist, in the San Marco Monastery in Florence. In the frescoes on the walls of the monastic retreat rooms, a symbiotic identity is forged between religious and artistic asceticism through restrained drawings depicting episodes of major import within that minor space. This is an expression of the ascetic artist, tending toward compression and purification.

Poisoned Artist:
These works were inspired by Primo Levi’s story about the searcher for lead in The Periodic Table. He portrays a man undertaking an exhaustive and exhausting journey in pursuit of the toxic material deep in the earth.  What brings him to the lead is a combination of ancestral knowledge, experience, talent, and the power of intuitive impulse like that of the salmon swimming against the current or the swallow returning to its nest.

The toxicity of lead does not deter the searcher, adhering magnetically through both innate and acquired knowledge. Such is the artist, impelled into a process of investigation and activity by inner ineluctability. These works represent lead directly and indirectly (strips of lead, pencil drawings), and metaphorically as a heavy yet muffled creative force eliciting artistic activity from the depths.

(Text accompanying exhibit at Sara Levy Gallery, Tel Aviv, 1995)