“When you cannot paint” by Yael Oren-Sofer (picture provided by Yael Oren-Sofer)
Sharing a blog I wrote at the Times of Israel:
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“When you cannot paint” by Yael Oren-Sofer (picture provided by Yael Oren-Sofer)
Sharing a blog I wrote at the Times of Israel:
No posts
I don't know if any Hamas fighters were artists of any kind; maybe some were (although Islam forbids representational art). But certainly there were leading Nazis who were artistic or connoisseurs of art (broadly speaking). Hitler himself was a (failed) painter and took more interest in art, particularly architecture, than in most other aspects of day-to-day government in the Third Reich.
As you indicate, art is probably better as a response to evil than as a protection against it. Literature is really the only art I understand or have any capacity for. I've been a compulsive writer for decades, but since 7 October, my writing has been more focused on Israel and Jew hate (I barely wrote about Israel before, although I had written a fair bit about Jew hate) and I've been more determined to get it into the public domain. It does feel a way of connecting to Jews and the war from where I am, in what I have often thought of as a backwater of the global Jewish community (London, UK). Likewise, I started reading TOI blogs obsessively. Having previously checked in on them occasionally, I looked for new ones multiple times a day.
The idea of abstract, expressionist or surreal art after 7 October intrigues me, as a way of expressing things that are too painful to say in a realistic way, although I'm not sure that I know enough to say any more about it.