For those who don't know yet, I have a hobby: gliding.
Flying without an engine is a magical thing in itself and I will tell you about it sometime, but in the context of my art this is where I get to see the world from a different angle, literally.
I worked on this painting with very long breaks for almost two years.
I was flying with one of the veterans of the Megiddo Gliding Club. We flew in a two-seater and reached The Star of Jordan, the plateau above Beit Shean.
I looked north at the view. The Sea of Galilee pooled between the Golan Heights and the Tiberias Range, and it was beautiful to see this big bowl with blue water at the bottom, but what caught me the most were the stripes of the fields.
For several years now I have been fascinated by the sight of man-made landscapes.
From the air, from a low altitude, our human squares and lines become a pattern that describes the three dimensions of the earth, and sometimes also illustrates in a surprising way the character of those who created it.
for example:
A lesson in aerial navigation
One of the first aerial navigation lessons I received was: How do you tell the difference between a Moshav and a Kibbutz?
This is important because it helps to compare the map with what you actually see.
The answer: The kibbutzim are built in a compact group of houses and are surrounded by huge communal fields, while the moshavim stretch their streets like noodles, and slice the land into thin strips that radiate from the houses, and everyone grows what they want in their strip.
From cloud base then, it is very easy to tell between a moshav and a kibbutz in this way.
And so I saw that on the ridge of Beit HaShitah the fields were large and wide, while on the ridge of Tiberias, the narrow fields climbed the mountain, beautifully delineating its shape, and revealing the type of people who created them.
I didn't draw in the glider 😊 the cockpit is very small. So I drew the picture "in my head". I practice seeing and remembering what I saw.
When I returned from that flight the image stayed with me.
Some time later, during one of the Covid lockdowns, I moved in with my parents for the duration, and I made this painting on their balcony.
The long color lines of the moshavim fields pulled at my brush, and the whole painting became made of stripes.
The wide stripes of the rotating movement of the thermals, the plowed stripes in the kibbutz fields above Tabor stream, the narrow stripes on the ridges of the lower Galilee, and also, perhaps the beginning of a new idea - stripes that describe the thermals that rise from the ground and create these clouds, and thanks to which I could see this sight and bring it to you.