My paintings and drawings

The works of genius created by great artists rose from their talents, their personalities, their ideas and the spirit of their times.

My work, with all due modesty, came into being from the same sources, and their conception stems from my love for drawing and my sensitivity to composition. In this text I try to explain the ties between my life-story and my paintings.

I was born in Argentina in 1941 and at the age of 13 I came with my parents to Nir Am, a kibbutz situated on the border of the Gaza Strip. In the 1950s the kibbutz looked like a military fortress. Around its fences were three army posts with trenches and firing positions. In the inner yard there were deep air-raid shelters where we would go during border incidents. I lived at Nir Am until I was 26.

My years at Nir Am shaped my paintings of the kibbutz courtyard, the fields surrounding Gaza and the scenes of shelters. In addition, there are scenes of pipes and parts of barrels which had previously served as cattle troughs of the kibbutz and which, after their use, were thrown onto the garbage site of the community. Roots and plants were also part of my experience as a farmer – a man of the fields.

After the period on the kibbutz, my wife and I moved to Jerusalem and following my studies at Bezalel Art School in the Department of Visual Communication, we moved to Haifa. Since then, the smoke from Haifa’s industrial bay has begun to appear in my drawing.

For 30 years I served in the Artillery Corps, partly in the regular army but mostly as a reservist. In the Six-Day War my unit fought in the Sinai Desert; since then, open spaces of desert sand appear in white in my drawings and in yellow ochre in my paintings. In the Yom Kippur War my unit fought on the Golan Heights and the Syrian enclave for a period of five and a half months. My paintings of battle fields stem from this period. It is likely that the bunkers that appear in them represent the wish to find shelter from the shelling.

The appearance of objects in the air represents an image of the ballistic movement of artillery shelling; these began to surface after the Yom Kippur War.

My paintings of traffic in a city space clearly represent the urban creature I am today.

My paintings of Bible scenes began when I was helping my young daughter in her studies of the Book of Genesis. Having never studied it at school, that was my first intense encounter with this book.

Recently, a doll has appeared in my painting – a direct result of the great help we give to our grandchildren. Carton boxes are a clear image of my family’s numerous house moves. These and other objects also represent my criticism of ecology in many of my paintings. My treatment of intimacy is represented by the appearance of men and women in my paintings and drawings.

The components that I have noted in this text: the figures, the roots, the boxes, the metal parts, the plants, the agricultural imagery, the smoke, the contrasts in shapes and colors – all serve me in the creation of my paintings and drawings. They should always be seen, beyond their narrative meanings, as a representation of shapes, colors and composition, which are the foundation of visual art.

Milo Shor,

Haifa, 5.11.2013