Israeli painter and photographer Amos Yaskil’s work can have an extraordinarily powerful impact on people. Just ask Milwaukee stained-glass artist Suzanne Derzon.
Derzon met him in December 2001, when she was paired with him in a Partnership 2000 artists exchange project. Both of them worked with nine other Israeli and six other American artists, including Milwaukeean Natalie Browne-Gutnik, on art works to help beautify the Poriya Government Hospital, the regional medical center near Tiberias.
“He uses these really strong colors and shapes, and they’re simple shapes, but they have a vibrancy about them,” said Derzon in a recent telephone interview. “[W]hen I see [his paintings] I feel they’re very strong and very rich…. These are things I’d like to surround myself with.”
Yaskil, who will be having his first Milwaukee exhibit Feb. 27-April 10, has had that power to astonish people for a long time — in fact, since he was 11 years old and had his first public exhibition in his native Haifa in 1946.
For the last 40-some years, Yaskil has lived in and painted the landscape of the area around Lake Kinneret, the region linked to Milwaukee in the Partnership 2000 project.
Today, after more than 50 years of work and exhibitions throughout Europe, North and South America and the Far East as well as Israel, Yaskil still “can’t live without painting,” as he said during an interview last December when he visited Milwaukee to see the sites for the exhibition.
If his painter’s eyes are focused on one subject in one place, Yaskil’s mind is nimble. During his interview with The Chronicle, he jumped from criticisms of modern architecture to his delight in the Michael Lord Gallery — one of the two sites exhibiting his work in Milwaukee; the other is the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center — to the “wonderful glasswork” Derzon has made for the Poriya hospital.
Yaskil comes from an artistic family. His German-born father was an artist and art teacher, and his older brother, also born in Germany, became an artist as well. “I was getting up to the smell of paint” in his family’s Haifa home, Yaskil said. “It gave me an appetite to start to paint also.”
Even so, Yaskil insists that he taught himself with minimal help from his father. “That’s the best school,” he said.
His Milwaukee exhibit, titled “Contemporary Landscapes of the Galilee and Jerusalem,” will begin with an opening reception for the artist on Thursday, Feb. 27, 5-8 p.m. at the Michael Lord Gallery, 772 N. Milwaukee St. The gallery will feature his paintings and two of Derzon’s windows; works on paper will be shown at the JCC.
Yaskil’s exhibit is co-sponsored by the Israel Center of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation and the JCC. For more information, contact the gallery at 414-272-1007 or www.lordgallery.com; or call the Israel Center, 414-390-5705.
MORE STORIES
Loading ...