יגאל רם

10 years ago, in 2014, was the last time I visited Moscow. It was a business trip, on the edges of which i took a metro to Kropotskinskaya, next to which stands the famous «храм христа спасителя», church of christ our savior, but my destination was a shrine of a different spirituality.

The lavish Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts holds one of the most exquisite collections in the world of 19- 20th century art, with grand works by Matisse, Monet, Degas Renoir and many more. I spent the entire afternoon there, giddy and elated.

To me, the impressionists, (including their lesser known contemporaries all over Europe) and their successors, the post impressionists and the fauves, have defined what painting is. There is really nothing else for me - not before, and not after, I’m mostly indifferent to artistic styles earlier than 1860 or later than 1950 (and that is generous).

The reason (if you care to ask) is that to me, impressionism liberated an democratized painting. Rather than a craft to intricately capture an object in two dimensions, available to select highly skilled few, it is a spiritual call for observing, for paying attention, something truly available to all.

Look at this Matisse behind me. It looks nothing like the real world. It’s not a bit an accurate depiction of a room. The shapes the perspective the lines and the colors are all “wrong”, inaccurate, as if child-like. Yet its clear that a human being was there, it’s not a filter, or AI. Its a human interpretation and depiction of what he had been observing and paying attention to. And that is a wonderful and unique thing, the proof of human attention.

I always loved drawing as a kid, and had a “good hand”. In the pre-vcr pre-youtube world I would spend hours-on-end drawing and making up cartoons and characters, drawing cowboys knights and ninjas from films I had just seen. But later on, except for some brief attempts with materials and genres, I dropped drawing or painting entirely. I found no meaning in it.

It took years (and Facebook) for me to stumble upon the works of Natalia Zourabova and her friends, Anna Lukashevsky and Olga Kundina, whose artistic style is a descendant of of the above, only contemporary and local, to say - wow - this is something real! The mix of crazy vivid colors capturing everyday Israeli scenes! The amazement was two-fold: the masterful interpretation and interplay of colors, but more importantly - the resounding proof that emanated from the works that someone was there... someone observed these mundane urban Israeli scenes... a human being was there and paid attention! It made my existential loneliness subside… which meant that the works had something sublime in them. “I must try it…" I told myself, and I waited until Natalia started her outdoor school Shmezalel - שמצלאל to, for the first time, go out and observe and casually express what I see. to let it resonate, to experience the joy of color, and learn to see it for what it really is.

Since then, painting from observation is just something I do. And I post my works, hoping that maybe viewing them would make someone elses loneliness subside as well. I had the privilege of studying with other masters, for which I’m very thankful, and I even taught it in several occasions (not as well as Natalia for sure) because I believe in it. My students would paint and draw and would get frustrated and I would encourage them, not just because I had to, as their teacher, but because when one is really frank in drawing from observation, there is always beauty in the result.

In the generation of a bustling mass society, machines and technology and mechanical image production and reproduction (photography and film) the impressionists moved the focus of painting from the result, the noun “painting” to the verb, the action, regardless the quality of the product, and painting from observation has become a call for meditation in action. Impressionist paintings have, therefore, become something like a proof of human attention, and a proposal, a call, for live human beings to occasionally pause, and pay attention.