We might look small beyond a painting. We can so easily look small, if we don’t remember that we are the ones creating all of it. The beauty and the horror.

As I’m doing these paintings, I’m thinking about duality, oppositions, polarities and sameness. Of course I think about the parities and disparities between Hamas and the Israeli State, and I think if the invented otherness that humans insist on creating. I think about the body and the spirit, my two children, the young and the old sibling, the girl and the boy. I think about Katarina and I, completely different, yet the same. Her wall in the studio and my borrowed one. I love diversity, I uphold the uniqueness of each living being, I find beauty in that, always. And yet, there is the universal, where we are all the same, that somehow is bigger, more meaningful, has a larger weight.

It’s been very challenging to go through this “Painting Like a Mother Residency” while witnessing the unfolding of the war between Israel and Palestine. I keep finding different answers in my mind to the questions “what is a painting?” and “what is a painting in the midst of war?” A painting is evidence of human life in face of human destruction. To paint is an act of radical hope. A painting can only carry forward the subtle, that which was noticed by human perception and expressed by our understandings and feelings. No matter how explicit the image in the painting or how strong the artist’s brushstrokes. A painting abstracts, elevates, undertones or highlights parts of our extremely complex reality. Amid war, a painting is the most useless object, something that invites the eye to look at, the body to rest within. The painting (like while painting we do) creates a new layer of reality.

May the new realities that I’m creating be of freedom and love.