Sketches

Sketches are a very powerful and convenient way to create.

When I am procrastinating before starting a big new painting and I am afraid of white space, I go to something completely different - a small and fast sketch. It's like art therapy for me. The loose and incomplete style in the sketch gives energy, expression, and some special feeling of belongingness to the place.

Actually, sketches were what triggered my comeback to art after long years of painting only when my family needed to fill empty walls. I've started to meet once a month with the members of the "Urban Sketchers Tel Aviv" society, and it was great fun. When you sketch outside in a group, it gives you legitimation and strength to stand looking over your shoulder and advice of passers-by, and after the meeting has been finished it's always interesting to see the variety of ways to paint the same spot.

That time all I saw around me was just transformed in my mind into a sketch view. it was like a filter in the smartphone camera built into my eyes (now the same happens to me but the transformation is to aquarelle paintings).

So, I sketched in Tel Aviv streets and restaurants, and in notebooks during boring meetings at work, and then I tried watercolors and it was my new love.

By I still sketch at home, from photos taken in my travels, without hot or rain or mosquitos disturbing me, and I sketch on spot, going to plein air with other artists, absorbing in the painting the energy of the place.

And the most powerful is travel sketching. If I manage to have a few sketches during travel and my family is patient enough to wait, then later, when watching the sketch, it works like the time-travel machine, immediately carrying me to the same day and place it was painted, rises memories, surrounding, smells and noises of the street.

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