Serigraph

MICHAEL ROZENVAIN

Michael Rozenvain was born in Kiev, Ukraina in 1963. He graduated from art college in Kiev, and after that in the Academy of decorative art in Lvov. He came to Israel in 1990.

Michael Rozenvain has a great talent in painting watercolors of flowers and landscapes, a subject and medium which many have disregarded and even scorned. To reveal such a great talent in painting watercolors in flowers is one of the most difficult things because a flower is the highest expression of beauty in nature, and the tools of painting which we have are not capable of depicting this beauty on canvas.

However, the task of great art is not to create anew the beauty of nature, but to create the beauty whose inspiration is drawn from nature. This is what Rozenvain achieves in his paintings.

In his works there is much more than an exact description of the smallest detail of the flower. They are recreated in his imagination and become transformed into a painting with its own rhythm. By his delicate arrangement of line and the placement of color unique to him, he lavishes on his works the mysterious indefinable sublimation which turns a painting into a work of art.

Abel Pann was born in Lithouania.

He began his artistic studies in Odessa and continued them in Paris. A number of his pictures have been acquired by the French Government, by the Municipality of Paris, by the Museum of Luzembourg and by the Art Institute of Chicago and a series of 45 pictures has been purchased in America for the National Museum of Jerusalem.

The Palestine Art Publishing Co. Ltd Jerusalem

Abel Pann wrote:

The task I have set myself involves a serious responsibility. The enthusiasm which my work arouses in me is often clouded by painful doubts and questionings. For that same Book which has inspired many a genius to produce his masterpiece has proved to be beyond the reach of a far greater number of artists.

A son of the race which produced this marvelous Book. I feel that I, better than some others, may be able to seize its true spirit, and to communicate it to my fellow-men.

But the absolute truth is with G-d alone. Mankind is ever the subject to error. And so I entreat the indulgence of my judges.

TANYA WISSOTZKY AND ALEXANDER GLATCHANSKY

The works of Tanya Wissotzky and Alexander Glatchansky are created by the interaction of two independent imaginations working in intellectual and aesthetic harmony. Each complements the other, producing works in which the process of creation is revealed as it reaches a harmonious yet complex resolution.

They have achieved a painterly idiom which is a visual dynamic of crescendo and diminuendo, a vibration between the sensuous and cerebral. Working in acrylic, pen and ink, and collage on specially prepared canvas, they speak in many voices which are yet one voice. The subdued pastel tones of the background swirl and gather romantically to focal points as rich in association as they are in colour. Superimposed upon them are the learned and expert line drawings of scenes both evocative and ironic.

These scenes, like sketches from the artist’s notebook, each contain a world of their own while commenting on the canvas as a whole. The excerpts of calligraphy from old English flower painting manuals underline the concern with process as well as result, while other calligraphic quotations celebrate Paris of the Twenties which is certainly one of the artists’ many sources of visual reference. In the still lifes, the classically executed centrepiece has all the nostalgia and romanticism of a time past, the colour rich and sensuous.

Juxtaposed against this are the music scores, totally dry and abstract and yet evocative of gaiety and pleasure. The eye is caught in pleasant surprise as the smaller quotations, in collage ink or paint, reveal themselves, linking the chain of associations in fascinatingly various ways. The work of this pair of young Israeli artists has received critical acclaim and success both in Israel and abroad and their works are to be found in public and private collections all over the world.

Tanya Wissotzky and Alexander Glatchansky were born in the same year, 1959, and studied at the Odessa Academy of Fine Arts. One of Ms. Wissotzky’s main interests besides her work as an artist is in the conservation of Nature. Alexander Glatchansky is a fine book illustrator in his own right and has been awarded prizes for his achievements in this field.