About this Series
This poem/painting project was begun in 2008. At that time, I was intrigued by the idea of translating poetic material into visual form and asked my friend, Ori Soltes if he knew of anyone who wrote poetry that was ‘vivid’ enough to express as a painted image. Ori is one of those people who is everywhere, all the time, teaching, lecturing, writing books traveling, curating exhibitions, and I don’t know what-all so I thought he of all people would be sure to know of someone. It turns out that indeed he did—he simply suggested himself! The project will consist of eighteen paintings, seventeen of which I have already completed. We chose the number eighteen because, when expressed in Hebrew letters (which also have numerical value), they spell the word ‘life’. I painted the text of each poem along with visual elements, inspired by both Medieval breviaries and Islamic manuscript paintings.