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Since my post “Sunflowers” I have struck up a lovely WhatsApp acquaintance with Bracha Fischel whose painting inspired my sunflowers pictures.
Just before shabbat, Bracha sends me a new picture along with a bracha (which means blessing) for a shabbat shalom (Saturday = day of rest & peace). She told me that I could post her pictures on my blog. I decided that I would share the pictures and a close-up of some detail of the work which impressed me. I hope that Bracha will continue to send me pictures and that I can continue to post them.
It is not evident from her work, but Bracha has severe mobility challenges and she paints with the brush in her mouth.
You can see Bracha’s story and a gallery of her work for yourself at:
http://brachafischel.com/index.html
OCEAN
The first painting that Bracha sent to me was an ocean scene
The first thing that struck me about the painting was the lovely pastel colors of the sky reflected on the ocean. However upon a second look I noticed the waves splashing on the rocks. You can see the movement and almost feel the wet mist from them. A close up shows that maybe Bracha achieved this by splots of white paint which look like they were flicked from her brush to the canvas.
MILL POND
The following week Bracha sent me this bucolic scene of a mill on a pond.
I love the colors in this painting, with the same blues in the sky and in the water. However, I have to be honest and say that this picture disturbed the engineer in me because I couldn’t figure out the narrative behind the scene. Usually a mill on water is run by a waterwheel, situated on water to take advantage of that energy source. The mill in the painting has wind vanes, which I feel would not be much use in this tranquil area. For windmills to work they need flat open spaces or high hills to catch the wind. They usually have much bigger vanes. If indeed there was sufficient wind in this secluded glade, I worry that the blades would get tangled in the trees. Finally I imagined a story which fits: The structure is not a mill at all. The building is an old, disused pump house. This fits because the vanes no longer have fabric on them (so it is not in service) and the trees have since grown up around the building (because it is old and abandoned) and besides the job would be done by an electric pump these days. The small blades are because it does not take much power to lift the water from the pond into whichever irrigation system it used to service. There! Whether I am correct or not, my inner engineer is satisfied.
HUNKERING IN THE SNOW
There was a wild week in Israel recently where a storm passed through Israel and dumped significant snow on Mt Hermon, the upper Golan Heights and on Jerusalem and hail and rain over the rest of the country. Bracha chose that week to send me the snowy picture below. You can see the buildings hunkering down against the cold, and although you can’t explicitly see and lights shining forth, the yellow reflections in the snow hint that there is shelter and warmth inside the buildings.
The thing I absolutely love about this picture though is the dramatic purple/bue sky. The same week that Bracha sent this to me my son sent a picture of his trip to the Golan Heights to see the snow. You can see the inspiration for the angry sky.
LEAVES & BERRIES
I let out a little gasp when I opened my next shabbat greeting from Bracha. The rich burnt red of the berries was stunning. As I wrote in my post “Sunflowers” the Bracha’s paints the “idea” of something. The picture of berries(flowers?) below is very detailed – with each berry defined and each leaf attached to an elegant twig which in turn is attached to a branch. However the plant is two dimensional – with the gorgeous pastel blue and yellow and pink background clearly visible through the leaves. There is no attempt to make the subject photographically accurate, but you get the idea from the simple berries and sinuous twigs and leaves and a fabulous profusion of color. In the close-up below the painting you can see the detail of the leaves. Each leaf has at least 3 colors, some more. And the colors are not all greens, they are enhanced with blue, violet and turquoise, even yellow.
WATER LILIES
The most recent picture I got from Bracha, just last week, is this beautiful little pond. Bracha here has taken a frog’s eye view of the pond, there is no sky, no vista, just the dense thicket across the water and the reeds and lilies in the pond. Again she has used many colors, as well as greens, in her foliage. The effect is stunning. It is such a secluded scene that I can imagine pixies and fairies hanging out here. There are probably trout in the water to keep the skeeters and midges down.
As you can see, I have a propensity to project “into” the paintings and Bracha’s scenes speak to me. Thank you Bracha, I totally love that you share your new works with me.