Three artists, three questions: Spotted at Fresh Paint 2024

For over a decade, the annual art and design fair Fresh Paint has provided great opportunities for Israeli artists, and galleries, to present their work. This is a meeting point for all the people in the field and often an incubator of promising new talents on the Israeli art scene.

Every year, Fresh Paint initiates, curates, and exhibits new art projects, presented to the public for the first time at the fair. This year, the atmosphere – perhaps even more so despite or due to the trauma Israeli society has been going through since Oct. 7 – gave viewers an experience of some fresh air: to breathe with an art atmosphere.

The nearly week-long exposition, which took place at the Tel Aviv Urban Sports Center at the beginning of this month, gathered thousands of art enthusiasts.

Walking through the gates of Fresh Paint, I saw happy people – the picture I want to preserve in my mind, worth it by itself.

Naturally, I went there seeking to encounter unique artwork that would draw my attention and encourage me to learn more about it and its creators. Not aiming at any specific demographic, I picked out the art of those who are mature, with a wealth of life experience, with varying degrees of it in the field of art. All of them prove it’s never too late to follow through with passion – or even to start, as some might consider, later in life. Three artists agreed to answer my three questions:

What inspires you?

What do you call art?

What, in your opinion, makes your artwork different from that of other artists?

MARINA GRECHANIK, 53, is an artist, illustrator, and art educator, specializing in urban sketching. She uses digital and traditional techniques, painting with gouache, acrylic, and oil pastels, drawing with pencils, and often mixing the media, creating collages. She illustrates magazines, as well as books for children and adults. At Fresh Paint 2024, she presented a series of her paintings.

Grechanik was born in Brest, a city in Belarus of the former Soviet Union. In 1990, at age 19, shortly after graduating from the Minsk State Art College, she made aliyah. She moved to Ra’anana, where she has lived since, and immediately started to work as a graphic designer. “I worked in it for 15 years, but my real passion was always to tell stories,” she told the Magazine. 

Today she is an independent artist, and the stories in her paintings stand out. At Fresh Paint 2024, the stories in her artwork were what attracted me and stopped me at her stand. Small in size, intimate, but filled with details and characters, her paintings were as inviting as two ladies chatting with each other in Jaffa.

Grechanik transfers her daily observations to her work. She said she never leaves home or her studio in Tel Aviv’s Kiryat Hamelacha without her sketchbook and art tools. “They must be accessible and fit in my bag,” she said. “I like to switch and mix them in unexpected combinations to suit the subject or my mood.”

They are always ready to be pulled out and capture a moment on paper. “My works are influenced by the surprise effect of street drawing and events over which I have no control,” she said. “The adrenaline and lack of time forces me to filter the information in front of me and put only the essentials into the painting.”

An active member of the Urban Sketchers community, she has initiated their Tel Aviv group and regularly leads “sketchcrawls.” Grechanik participates in many projects and teaches at international symposiums, such as in Barcelona and Tel Aviv. 

She also regularly takes part in group exhibitions as an exhibitor and curator, and in events in the local art and illustration community. She was selected to be part of the Independent Artists’ Greenhouse, which “showcased works of 42 promising, unrepresented artists at the beginning of their professional career” at this year’s Fresh Paint, according to the art fair’s website.

Inspiration

“My inspiration can be everywhere. The most wonderful subjects are around us; we just need to look for the stories. I am not talking about fancy postcard views; the places that are too pretty usually don’t attract me. I love real-life surroundings that challenge me to find beauty in ugliness and everyday events. Places that we pass by often can suddenly take on a different meaning if we look at them more closely. 

“I love to document actions, to transfer emotion, mood, and atmosphere of a moment. When I sketch, even in my own country, I feel like a tourist: curious, interested, a bit disconnected but friendly [toward what I see]. Every day is the opposite of extraordinary and exciting, but once we let ourselves immerse in it, there is a chance we’ll discover something new and poetic!”

Meaning of art

“Nowadays, the margins of defining art are very blurred. One core parameter of real art for me is the artist’s personality and his/her truth. It is not about technique, style, or media. The most important thing for me is being truthful to yourself.”

Grechanik’s art

“Every artist is different from the other, as there are no identical people in the world. It’s difficult for me to define what makes my work different. I think that carrying a sketchbook every day in my bag for the last 20 years and experiencing my everyday through it is what drives and feeds my art, and maybe makes it mine. Direct observation allows me to be a part of my visual stories, to feel them, pass them through my stomach. I hope it succeeds in touching the viewers.”

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OREN JACKMAN, 49, paints hyper-realism oils, highlighting the imperfections in his workspace in southern Tel Aviv, where “everything is broken, rusty, stained, detached, or crooked – as if scarred from previous, perhaps better, life experiences,” he said.

Born and raised in Rehovot, Jackman is now based in Tel Aviv. He studied art at the Avni Institute of Art and Design 30 years ago but exhibited his art for the first time at Fresh Paint 2024. This is “my first exhibition, at the age of 49: I am a late bloomer,” he told the Magazine. “As a young man, I decided not to turn art into profession; I felt it would have ruined my creative life. So I went for a BA in law at Tel Aviv University, followed by an MA in literature and creative writing at Ben-Gurion University,” he said, adding that he has worked in education, journalism, start-ups, and the TV industry.

As for art, everything changed for Jackman during the COVID-19 pandemic. He found himself working alone for many hours, which nourished his creativity processes. A few years later, he realized that there was no more wall space in his home and studio to hang his works, so he decided to show his art to others. Having had so many other professional experiences, Jackman is ready to move his art out of the hobby zone.

At Fresh Paint, he presented an installation called Robbery in the Studio, which despite its dominance of sunny, optimistic colors, has heavy content. “It dealt with my two greatest fears: that my works would be stolen or purchased,” he admitted. The viewers of the exhibition were invited to enter the studio environment recreated at the fair: crooked easels holding oil paintings, windows opening to the concrete outside, the stained sink above the broken floor, a smiling skeleton, a scratched stainless steel table with a mix of oil paint tubes and oranges, and more.

The intention was “to appear as if caught amid a robbery – canvases with torn edges and gold-stained with fingerprints and footprints of a kind of Midas touch, where everything touched turns into gold.”

Jackman’s installation was shown in the section Galleries & Projects presented by Two Curators Present.

Inspiration

“I am inspired by American hyper-realism, alongside Israeli poor art’; [Swiss artist H. R.] Giger’s horror, alongside Nachum Gutman’s innocence. From Picasso and Van Gogh to the least of scribblers on Instagram. I find humor and charm in the contrasts.”

Meaning of art

“In my opinion, art is anything that the viewer perceives as art. But good art is anything the viewer recognizes as art but goes beyond the comfort and tranquility of design. To me, good, or at least interesting, art is that which creates discomfort.”

Jackman’s art

“While the origins of American hyper-realism were better than photography and better-than-life artworks, I’m trying to take the exact opposite direction: choosing the worst-in-the-room and emphasizing its weakest spots. The result is the aestheticism of the ugly. Moreover, as the creator of oil painting installations, I force the viewer to become a participant and allow his or her position to affect the way he or she perceives the artwork while carefully navigating through it.”

www.instagram.com/o.jackman.art/

HANNA ELAN YONES, 71, is a sculptor. Her artwork was presented at the Fresh Paint art fair this year for the third time, this time together with painter Tova Pesach and paper artist Bianca Severijns as part of the Wertheimer Gallery project Symbiosis. Elan Yones showed green sculptures measuring more than two meters high with animal-like features, which the artist calls Bereyshit. However, as she said, everyone can see in her work what they want. I saw some surrealist fairytale creatures.

Elan Yones was born in Kibbutz Lehavot HaBashan in the North. At age five, her family moved to Karei Deshe, where she grew up by the shores of the Sea of Galilee. As the daughter of one of Israel’s first organic botanists, Shlomo Elan, she acquired a great appreciation for nature, the environment, animals, and the wild world. She recalls that her family was always very artistic, often sitting on their terrace and painting the landscapes together.

She took a longer path to becoming an artist, however. She only decided in her mid-50s that she wanted “to wake up in the morning and create” – to sculpt. “I returned to art studies, painting, and sculpture at the Basis School of Art in Netanya. Four years of studies provided me with the tools I am using today.”

Earlier, she studied biology at Tel Aviv University, sculpture and painting at The Avni Institute, and law at Ono Academic College, Kiryat Ono. She worked in various fields, including dog grooming, TV and theater makeup, interior design, and event management, and volunteered at a zoo.

Although her artworks transcend geographical boundaries and reflect her experiences and attachment to nature, they all are made of synthetic materials. Some of her sculptures, including those presented at Fresh Paint 2024, are in natural green colors and, on the surface, look as if they are made of porcelain; others have vivid, metallic colors.

In the past 15 years, Elen Yones has participated in many group exhibitions in Israel and abroad.

Inspiration

“I believe that nature and animals play an important role in human existence. Both enrich my imagination and inspire my creativity.”

Meaning of art

“Art is a communication path, a way to connect the inner world of artists and the world around them. It is a way to convey messages and feelings, and share experiences and ideas. This is a gateway to my world, a means for intimate experiential sharing with others.”

Elan Yones’s art

“There is no person like any other. An artist’s work is a devoted reservoir and a window to the creator’s unique soul. The language the artist chooses to communicate with the environment shows the original way of engaging with the world; their experiences.

“My sculptures are made of Styrofoam. I make molds and cast them; the casts are made of various polymers.

“In the works I presented at Fresh Paint, I developed a new method of combining different types of polymers and putties, achieving a unique result.” www.hannayones.com/    ■