I am privileged to be able to offer you a guest post by Haifa artist Tamar Messer. Tamar’s work includes prints, mosaic, 3d “found” sculptural works as well as books, invitations and Ketubbot. This post focuses on Tamar’s Eicha/Lamentations but I highly urge you to go to her website to see her other work too. As Tamar will explain, the Lamentations works use a different technique than her other work. Usually Tamar’s work is extremely rich in color, vivid and lush, and well thought out. Please do check out her site. Another note- it is worthwhile to take a look at the Eicha inside as the images do add to your understanding of the text. Now on to Tamar Messer.
Lamentations:
I pushed off illustrating the Book of Lamentations for five years. I deliberated over how to relate to this difficult text. The colorful, detailed style that is typical of my earlier work was not appropriate in this case. After rereading the text many times, I had a revelation and realized that the Book of Lamentations came to prophecy the destruction of European Jewry and in the end leads to hope – to the establishment of the State of Israel. Once this realization had come to me, the work flowed and each verse found its interpretation and visual solution. I decided that it would be most appropriate to draw it in black and white, except for the last verse of hope, which appears in color. I chose to use a new technique for me – linoleum cut, in order to intensify the concept. This technique produces illustrations with lines that have great intensity and it is reminiscent of the German expressionism that was in practice in the period between the two World Wars and which was criticized by the Nazis.
Image #1: The Lord has cast off his altar, he has loathed his sanctuary, he has given to the hand of the enemy the walls of her palaces; they have made a noise in the house of the Lord, as in the day of an appointed feast. On Kristallnacht, many synagogues across Germany were destroyed.
Image #2: He has set me in dark places, as those who are long ago dead. The continuation of the verse reinforces my interpretation and the visual images – “He has walled me around, so that I cannot get out; he has made my chain heavy. Also when I cry and shout, he shuts out my prayer.”
Image #3: For these things I weep; my eye, my eye runs down with water, because the comforter that should relieve my soul is far from me; my children are desolate, for the enemy has prevailed. The end of the verse says “for the enemy has prevailed”; I saw the Nazi swastika symbol as the letter ב (bet) that appears at the end of the Hebrew word, enemy (“אויב”).
Image #4: My virgins and my young men are fallen by the sword; you have slain them in the day of your anger; you have slaughtered without mercy. I portrayed the fighters of the Warsaw ghetto as the heroes who did not capitulate and died the death of martyrs.
I am available for questions- info at tamarsgallery.co.il
Add a Comment