Netta Canfi Bio
Netta Canfi paints man-made landscapes.
Sometimes they mix or collide with wild nature, creating strange sights.
She goes out to paint in Plein air with oil or gouache, and employes her 20-year experience as an animator to describe movement and story in a single frame or in a series of images.
Flying non-powered gliders gives her another view of the world, and from there she practices painting from memory.
The sights and colors of the desert around Be’er-Sheva, the grasses of southern England, the Jerusalem stones, Tel Aviv concrete and farmlands of Giv’at-Ada make up in patterns in her work where the presence of human beings shape the landscape.
Born in Be’er-Sheva in 1976, Netta had the privilege of learning in the city’s Youth Art Center for 12 years, and later studied Animation in Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem.
Gross Gallery in Tel Aviv, and the mentorship of Naomi Shalev was a place to try new things.
In a time where most of Netta’s work was digital animation in front of a computer screen, Naomi’s encouragement to create installations and work with physical materials and spaces became a deep source of inspiration, present in her work to this day.
Netta lives and works in Giv’at Ada, where even the view from the driveway is worth a painting.
Exhibitions
Solo Exhibitions
2023, Trees for Tu Bishvat (Holiday), Tiferet Binyamin Synagogue, Binyamina, Israel.
2022 Supplement Planting, Noya Art Gallery, Alon Tower, Tel Aviv.
2021, Taking a Walk - Wild vs. Manmade Landscapes, Givat Ada Library, Israel
2011, Burning of the Dead, Gross Gallery, Tel Aviv Israel (installation)
2009, Claustrophobia, Gross Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel (installation)
Group Exhibitions
2024, January, Strada Easel Daily Painting Challenge, Online.
2023, "Creating a Place", Binyamina, Street Show, Israel.
2023, "Landscapes are Sometimes...", Chagall Artist House, Haifa, Israel.
2023, "I'm a Woman", Chagall Artist House, Haifa, Israel.
2022, 100 Year Celebration of Binyamina, Street Show.
2021, Nature, Environment and Sustainability in Contemporary Israeli Art, Bat Yam Art Institute, Israel.
2012, Self Portrait, (Title of my work - Half a Tree), Gross Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel
Auctions
KooKoo Auction
Israel's Art at Dawn, Online Benefit Art Sale
Bring light to the art community harmed by the October 7th attack.
All proceeds are dedicated to Israel’s Art at Dawn -
an immediate relief and response fund.
Collections
The Ben Gurion University of the Negev – two commissioned portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Zlotowski.
Education
1999-2003: Animation, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, Israel
1996 Art in the Technological Era, Open University course, Tel Aviv, Israel
1982-1994: Be'er Sheva Youth Art Center, Multiple courses, Be'er Sheva, Israel
Volunteer Work
2023-24, Three-months work with children and adults evacuated to the Dead Sea hotels, following the October 7th Massacre.
I gave weekly drawing, comics and plasticine workshops to kids ages
6-12.
Artist Statement
Wishing to step away from the computer after 20 years of commercial animation, I started painting outdoors with a friend.
From two years of painting trips, a theme emerged: "Half a Tree". This is what I call the trees on the streets of Tel Aviv, planted too close to a building so half their canopy gets cut off.
In these outings, I discovered many more types of "Half Trees" - various ways in which humans shape nature, especially in agricultural uses. Net-covered fruit trees became an obsession of sorts. They appear like strange giant lollipops, inspiring me to play with their shapes.
I keep discovering new variations.
On weekends I fly gliders and see the world from another perspective.
Drawing while flying is, well, inadvisable, so I practice remembering what I see, but I find that works done from memory have less detail and more emotion in them.
In contrast, my paintings from direct observation in the field are straightforward, realistic representations.
In the studio, I combine the two into large, complex works, sometimes with some added imagination.
I explore the shapes and colors of the many ways in which humans modify nature and report back to you, the viewer, about the wild ones, the man-made ones, and what happens when they interact.
Ultimately I enjoy painting from life and the return to physical paints – gouache and watercolor, oil, pen, and pencil.
Inspirations
Dani Karavan (Israeli Sculptor)
I grew up in his creations.
As a small child, I played in the Negev Brigade Memorial, not knowing what it meant, only realizing on a very basic level that someone, a person, an artist, has created this experience for me.
Ever since then, that is what I understand art to be: Creating an experience for people.
Two of my three gallery exhibitions were installations in which the viewers could become active participants.
Archeology
On a larger scale than Karavan's, it took me a while to realize that I live as a part of a large piece of human creation.
Israel is one of the most "man-made" countries on Earth.
8,000 years of human civilization has left all sorts of marks on this land.
Here are mounds of artwork from all ages. Remains of great cities and travel stations that formed a junction of continents, peoples, and ideas.
Israel is filled with stories that fire the human soul.
When I look down at Tel Megiddo, Armageddon, from my glider, when I go there and paint the excavation and learn more and more about it, I feel connected to a line of artists that goes all the way back to the hunter-gatherers who first built a shrine there, carving animal figures into the stones.
Flying Gliders
Flying has given me a different perspective of the world, literally, politically, and metaphorically.
Soaring is a unique type of flying. Without an engine, you are deeply dependent on the ground over which you fly, and its interactions with sunlight, wind, and water.
Glider pilots must be accomplished meteorologists and understand geography and agriculture. We fly with the birds and have a first-row seat to witness climate change.
In Israel, the airspace is also tightly bound by the political reality of the region.
That is what my first installation in Gross Gallery was about: It was a wing of a glider circling in a confined room.
The work was titled "Claustrophobia", which was what I felt when I learnt how restricted our airspace is.