נוף ישראלי באקוורל דחוס | אורה ראובן

Dense Watercolor Israeli Landscape | Ora Ruven

In 2020 the pandemic shut us in our homes. Watercolor is done at the kitchen table. Grief seeps from the body’s cells and floods the paper with reverence for simple fragments of life — the faces of those we love, our home, our neighborhood. But watercolor in the 21st century? Who does that anymore?

Alongside painting, I studied the history of watercolor, and of Israeli landscape painting, in order to understand my own place within it.

In the series “Watercolors · 2020,” I did not follow the tradition of Israeli landscape painting. I paint my neighborhood. Tall white apartment buildings rise above the lawns and the manicured park trees.

The Israeli landscape familiar from painting is usually cultivated fields, mountain expanses, cypresses lining roads — a landscape of labor and of land. That is not the landscape I paint. What exists here is a planned landscape: a trimmed lawn, cypresses planted at regular intervals, white buildings. This is my Israeli landscape, the one I live inside, the landscape of a residential neighborhood. And I paint it because it is my home.

Israeli landscape painting was once a collective Zionist expression of appropriating the land and connecting to nature, but it underwent significant shifts — from the genre’s suppression and its return in the 1970s as personal expression and refuge from politics, to contemporary art that revisits landscape from a place of wonder but also of urbanization, alienation, and cultural estrangement, engaging with the personal. In my painting I present the personal — my neighborhood. It is home, and it is nature, and it is urban.

I did not follow the medium’s traditional conception. Instead of the familiar transparency and lightness, I painted in dense, richly saturated color, in the intense greens of Ramat Aviv. It felt right to paint it in a present, tangible color, not in the airy distance usually associated with the medium.

There is a common assumption that watercolor must be transparent. But there is an entire tradition of dense, almost opaque watercolor — Winslow Homer, Charles Burchfield, Dong Kingman, and in our own time artists like Fabrice Gygi and Callum Innes. Why should I adhere to tradition instead of using everything the medium allows? Rather than focusing on the “spirituality” of transparency, I choose the “factuality” of color, and in doing so grant the urban landscape weight and substance.

In contemporary art, many artists continue to challenge expectations of the watercolor medium. The article “Top 20 Contemporary Watercolor Artists” features, among others, Fabrice Gygi, who uses solid, luminous fields of color that lend his works powerful material presence, as well as Callum Innes, a leading abstract artist, who uses layers of watercolor to create maximal effects through a conscious engagement with color theory. These artists, and many others, exploit watercolor not only for delicate transparency, but also to create rich textures, saturated tones, and an emphatic visual presence.