Watercolor treasures: Building portraitist volunteers to paint lost homes

Jordana Golding is a watercolor artist who paints “building portraits.”

Clients come to her, she says, “with photos of buildings that have great significance in their lives, such as the café where they went on their first date with their spouse, or their childhood home, or somewhere else, and I paint it in watercolor.”

Since Oct. 7, Golding has been reaching out to people from the South and the North who have lost their homes or been displaced.

She wants to get the message across to any of them who would like a painting of their homes. “For those kinds of commissions, I do it free of charge. Obviously, I couldn’t take money for such a thing, and I would just love to reach more people.”

Golding just wants “to help everyone have that memory because it must be so terrible for them,” she says.

SHE BEGAN painting buildings at age 21, when her parents sold their family home in the UK.

“I wanted a picture for me and my family and I love painting, so I went back to London to visit and took photos of the house – and then came home to paint it,” she explains.

“I painted it, and then my sister-in-law, who is very artistic herself, said: ‘Great! I want you to do the house I just bought with your brother.’ So I did that. And then, through word of mouth, I got more and more commissions. I used my marketing background and started to advertise, and then I got strangers asking me to do buildings of significance to them,” she recounts.

“And then, in the war, it occurred to me that people were losing their homes for the worst reasons possible – not for good reasons such as I am used to, like clients who say ‘We got married and had to leave our childhood homes,’ but for really sad reasons.

“And I thought: ‘These people deserve to have that memory framed – a picture of their house as they knew it before it was destroyed.’”

Golding has already completed half a dozen commissions but is averse to sharing pictures of those paintings out of respect for the owners’ privacy.

They are very personal, she says.

“I have done half a dozen for people from the South, mostly Kibbutz Re’im, one in Be’eri, one in Kfar Aza,” she says. “It’s emotional when you are painting it, knowing that none of that is there anymore, and it’s probably an army base right now. It’s emotional sending them to the clients, as they haven’t seen their houses in a while and I wish that they could only remember the good memories from it.”

IN TERMS of technique, Golding first makes a pencil sketch, which she sends to the client to approve. “It can always be fixed at that stage.” While she copies exactly from the photos she is given, it can happen that “the images I copy might not be exactly the same as they are in people’s memories. The building might look two-dimensional in the photo and then after I draw it – because they see it in their memory, not from the photo – they say, for instance, ‘Actually, that door looked a bit different...’”

Once they confirm that they like the look of it, she goes ahead.

“Then I carry on with the rest of the painting by going over the pencil lines with a black pen and then erasing the pencil, and then going in with watercolor paints and touching up here and there with the black pen.”

Golding then continues, using very light brush strokes of opaque color (“because you really can’t move it around too much once the pigmented paints are on the page”) and keeps adding layers – “until it’s what I want.”

“All the little bricks that you see,” she says, “I do them by hand with a tiny brush. I draw the little square and fill it in. I don’t have like a stamp or something.”

Golding calls International Women’s Day her favorite day of the year.

“I am definitely the biggest feminist I know,” she says.

“I come from a line of hard-working women who are self-made, with their own businesses – even in generations where it wasn’t so acceptable to be a woman owning her business.”

Her grandmother, she recounts, was the first woman in England to have a credit card without the need for her husband as a signatory. In those days, if a woman wanted to spend over a certain amount on her card, her husband had to authorize it.

“That’s the kind of stories that I grew up on, and now to be a small business owner on my own is very rewarding,” she asserts.

Golding also hails “from a house of mainly men: brothers, uncles, and my dad, of course.”

She considers them all “a wonderful influence,” pointing to her relationship with them as making her more boisterous and tough.

The artist says that Nana, her paternal grandmother, was very artistic, “and she passed it on to my dad and on to me.

“Nana was also a business owner in London all her life with her husband, my grandfather – and so was my mother.” 

Golding’s mother was a stay-at-home-mom, which her daughter defines as “a big job.” Later, she “decided she wanted to make some money, and so she went out and did.” Golding recently discovered that her mother also liked to paint and “was actually very talented.”

“So maybe I got it from her, after all,” her daughter says with a laugh.

WHILE SHE knows it’s International Women’s Month, she insists that “I don’t want to forget my dad in all this because from a very young age, I was asking him to shlep me to all parts of the country, to take me to art exhibitions, to find the best art equipment and the best place to sell things. I would drive him nuts my whole childhood, and he always encouraged me.

“He was always there to kick me up the backside, saying ‘You can do that commission, that’s not above you – you can do that.’ He dragged me to all my universities – I got accepted to the London College of Art and to five other universities to study art.”

Golding’s parents insisted that she was only allowed to attend a school away from home if she first spent a gap year in Israel.

“My parents insisted on it,” she said. “They said that there was a lot of anti-Zionism on campus; that I had to be prepared and really needed to understand and know how to defend Israel against things like apartheid week, antisemitism and anti-Zionism – which we are now unfortunately seeing a lot of.”

She came to Israel on a gap year program and fell in love with the country. “It backfired on them,” she says, “because I came back to England after the year and said ‘I am not staying here: I want to live in Israel – and to live in Israel, I have got to do what all the other people my age are doing, which is to join the IDF.’”

Golding looks back on the past few years with pride. “I gave up all those places” in universities and instead “became a combat soldier at checkpoints and fought a lot of terror attacks,” she said, but “always painted during every five seconds of free time I had.” 

The beating heart of Tel Aviv

Curated by Fiammetta Martegani, “The Beating Art of Tel Aviv” exhibition comprises works by Jordana Golding, Tanya Past, and Tamir Yehuda, completed “long before the war began,” Golding explains.

Since 2022, “The Art and Soul of Tel Aviv project” has combined various artists with differing techniques who, together, “become the storytellers of the city,” explains Martegani.

“What brings them together in their artwork is their love for the White City, the Bauhaus movement, its light, and its vibes,” the curator says. “Like an orchestra, each uses a different instrument, and all together they play the symphony of this unique place in the world, where the conductor is the city itself.

“After five editions of this exhibition, October 7 arrived, and we asked ourselves if we could and should put together a new edition, including all the works selected just a few months before the Black Shabbat.”

As curator, Martegani held many discussions with Hagit Shahar, director of the Drahi Center, “about our next move.”

“I felt so heartbroken, that I suggested changing the title and – at least for this edition – calling it “The Broken Art of Tel Aviv” instead of “The Art and Soul of Tel Aviv project.”

But Shahar responded: “We are not broken, we are beating!”

“This is how we conceived this new exhibition, “The Beating Art of Tel Aviv” explains Martegani, “asking each artist to add to their works the feeling of ‘beating,’ to show the resilience of Israel in a time of war. For me, as curator, this is a crucial message to spread during such a difficult time in our lives.

“Because, despite everything, we are still in the middle of a very long journey; we are still beating,” she says: “Like the heart – and the art – of Tel Aviv.”

The exhibition is scheduled to run until April 1 at the Sport and Culture Community Center, Kalisher 5, Tel Aviv. For more information, 073-3844151 or kalisher@tel-aviv.gov.il 

Continuity and hope despite destruction

“I did an Instagram post for my clients abroad,” Golding said. “I took a very beautiful commission of a random picture and I destroyed it, I burnt it and punched a hole in it – and it looked horrifying and it was like: ‘If this horrifies you, imagine people losing their homes and their life.’”

She posted:

To all my clients outside of Israel, A home is where one is supposed to feel safe. You’re greeted by familiar voices and the smell of home-cooked meals. You fall asleep with the comfort of knowing that your loved ones are just in the room next door. 

This is no longer the case in Israel. Our homes are being bombed. They’re being burnt to the ground with families inside. Terrorists broke doors down to have their way with whoever was inside. They graffitied the walls, ripped down curtains, smashed windows, and left bloody footprints. Everywhere. 

Thousands of Israelis right now are living out of frantically packed suitcases in unfamiliar environments. They’ve had to leave behind family heirlooms, photos, toys, and bodies of relatives because a terrorist organization within our midst saw it fit to destroy everything and everyone in their wake, the elderly and babies included. 

A home is so much more than walls and windows, it’s where memories are built and preserved. Nobody should have it taken away from them.

“If you or someone you know has lost a home or a business in this dreadful war and you wish to remember it for how it was before, please be in touch. I’d like to help you preserve that memory, free of charge. We’ll get through this. We don’t have a choice. Jordana.

“It was like a ‘shock-factor’ kind of post for people not living in Israel,” Golding said, “and the curator, Fiammetta Martegani saw the post and said that the painting of the destroyed house should be in the exhibition – and the exhibition should be about continuity and hope.”

For more information, see Jordana Golding’s website: artbyjorderz.weebly.-com