In different ways, Milwaukee artists Suzanne Derzon and Natalie Browne-Gutnik recently experienced how Israeli culture can be different from that of the U.S.
For they met in Israel a prevalent laid-back attitude that Browne-Gutnik described as, “Things will happen, but it’s going to get done. They’re not into the planning for assembly that some of us are.”
Indeed, things happened during the artists exchange with Milwaukee’s Partership 2000 region of Sovev Kinneret (around the Sea of Galilee). The resultant little comedies of errors nevertheless came out or will come out fine, demonstrating perhaps the indomitable Israeli optimism that “hakol yihiye beseder,” all will be well in the end.
And none of these mishaps marred the overall positive effect of the experience on these two.
“The experience for me personally was, next to being married to my husband, probably the most memorable event in my life,” said Browne-Gutnik. “The opportunity that was afforded to me and all of us to create something that is in a public place that shows how I feel about being in Israel is just something that’s indescribable. This is something I never dreamed would happen.”
Derzon called the visit “one of the most enriching and expanding times I’ve ever spent.”
Israelis ‘need flexibility’
Seven American artists from the Sovev Kinneret’s U.S. partner Jewish communities — four from Minneapolis-St. Paul and one from Tulsa, as well as the two from Milwaukee — visited Israel Dec. 1-13 to meet with 10 Israeli artists and work with them on artworks that will be permanently displayed at Poriya Government Hospital, the regional medical center near Tiberias.
For Derzon, the most memorable part of her experience, apparently, was meeting one of her two Israeli partners. Amos Yaskil is a painter and printmaker, who “does these wonderful landscapes. They just knock your socks off, they are so intense,” Derzon said.
While her other partner, Ron Gshuri, was a fellow stained glass artist and a colleague in “techniques and materials,” Derzon found Yaskil to be on her esthetic wavelength. “Just being with him and listening to him talk and sharing ideas; we didn’t have to be the same type of artist, just point out different things for each other to see. I’d never had an experience like that. It was so invigorating.”
The artists also were able to discover aspects of Israel that many tourists don’t see. Derzon recalled visiting Ammud Canyon just south of Safed, a place that is “supposed to have mystical powers” and “has the strangest atmosphere. It was just amazing.”
Browne-Gutnik learned about how difficult it is to work as an artist in Israel. It seemed to her that “every fourth Israeli is an artist of some kind,” but “there is nowhere to sell their wonderful artwork…. What I would like to see is for Jewish communities across the country to find ways to bring Israeli artists here to show and sell their artwork.”
When it came to dealing with their own artworks, the little mishaps appeared.
After communicating via e-mail with her Israeli artist partner, photographer Sharon Tribelsky, Browne-Gutnik made what she intended to be a “floorcloth” — a painted canvas on the theme of Lake Kinneret coated with a waterproof sealant, 7.5 feet wide by 11 feet long.
She packed it in a PVC pipe to bring with her to Israel — and it got lost in transit, not arriving until Dec. 10.
Then the artist and the recipients couldn’t figure out where to put it. It had been intended for a floor in a corridor between two of the buildings in the complex. But the floor was uneven, and the floorcloth had to lie absolutely flat, or it would be ruined.
So the floorcloth is now suspended from a second-floor balcony extending down behind a first-floor information desk, “So when you walk into the building … you see the [now] wallcloth,” said Browne-Gutnik. “It is big and dramatic.”
Derzon is scheduled to create eight stained glass windows, two for each of the waiting rooms on the four floors of a new building in the complex.
But “my work is so site-specific that I needed exact measurements, so my windows would fit into their windows.” And somehow she just couldn’t obtain these measurements until she went to Israel and saw the building. So “I was the only one [of the artists] who didn’t have anything ready,” Derzon said.
She is now working on the windows here, hopes to bring two of them to Israel with her when she goes on the Milwaukee Jewish Federation mission next month (see related story, this page), and estimates that it will take her six months to complete the set.
Browne-Gutnik was able to accept this difference between her and the Israelis’ approaches to work. “I’m assuming that this is more than a cultural difference, that because of the type of lives they lead, [Israelis] need more flexibility than we do here,” she said. “Also they don’t have equipment there that we take for granted.”
P2K links diaspora communities to regions in Israel for joint projects that promote development in the regions and person-to-person contacts between Israeli and diaspora Jews. It is sponsored by the Jewish Agency for Israel, the Keren Hayesod and United Jewish Communities, the umbrella organization of North American Jewish Federations.
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