The Jerusalem Studio School - הסדנא לציור ורישום, ירושלים

Announcing the New JSS Blog Editor

jerusalemss — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:52:42 +0000

I would like to welcome Larry Groff as the new editor of the Jerusalem Studio School blog. I’m enthusiastic that his experience with editing his Painting Perceptions blog will bring us a valuable asset. Painting Perceptions, features interviews with a wide variety of contemporary perceptual painters and stories relevant to modern figurative painting. Working as the new JSS blog editor, he will continue our tradition of providing thoughtful and engaging interviews with leading painters as well as looking for additional compelling subject matter and enhancements to the blog that will help expand our international readership.

Larry Groff has been a friend of the Jerusalem Studio School and attended the JSS Summer program in Italy in 2010. He also helped organize one of Stuart Shils’ workshops in San Diego, California. He lived in Boston most of his life but moved to Southern California a few years ago. He has an MFA from Boston University and BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art where he studied with George Nick. Larry has been a painter for over 25 years and you can view his website here.

Israel Hershberg

Director & Founder

JSS in the Light of Italy 2011

jerusalemss — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 08:21:13 +0000

Student Work From JSS at the Certosa 2011

The JSS Benefit Presale & Live Auction in NYC

jerusalemss — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:09:47 +0000

Click on invite to enter the Presale & Live Auction Event and Browse Thru the Works

Dear Friends of the Jerusalem Studio School,

Welcome to the JSS Benefit Auction.

The works seen here are available now at the presale prices listed and those not sold will be auctioned live during the benefit event at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects on February 21st.

Twenty-six acclaimed American artists, two distinguished art dealers and admired colleagues have donated outstanding work to help the JSS out of a crisis created this past summer when the executive director of the school disappeared leaving it with a $450,000 debt. It has been very moving to witness the support of so many people during this critical period. The new Israeli board members dug deep into their own pockets to ensure that the school opened this fall. The generosity of these artists that we so highly regard, stems from their knowledge and experience of the uniqueness of the Jerusalem Studio School. It is a professional vote of confidence of which all of us at the JSS are very proud.

Thank you to all of who made this benefit possible: the 26 contributing artists, Roy Davis & Cecily Langdale of Davis Langdale Company, Inc, Barbara Weis JSS Chairperson, Linda Adams JSS Board member, Peggy Brill and Kyle Staver volunteers.

We look forward to seeing you at the Live Auction, an important evening for the future of the Jerusalem Studio School.

If you will not be able to attend, please feel free to buy Presale or donate generously via Donate Sideways.

With much appreciation for your participation.

Israel Hershberg Steven Harvey

Founder and Director Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects

Coming Up at the JSS: Something New

jerusalemss — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 19:05:27 +0000

THE JSS BOTTEGA SERIES

בעברית לחץ כאן

We are pleased to introduce the Jerusalem Studio School Bottega Series workshops.

The “bottega” in Italy was a master’s workshop where students or apprentices participated in the execution of works and processes so as to learn through direct experience, for the eye and for the hand, their chosen art or craft.

The JSS’s new Bottega Series is just that: themed workshops where various methods, materials and techniques, both common as well as rare and sometimes esoteric, will be demonstrated and explained step by step. We believe that learning in a bottega environment is particularly revealing for today’s students because what were once common methods, materials and techniques have become all but lost or misunderstood in our day – rendering most of them “rare”.

The JSS Bottega Series now reintroduces many of these methods and processes in a unique environment, the bottega, that will instill in artists, students and craftspeople a greater accessibility, intimacy and knowledge of materials, methods and techniques, whether in proceeding in a deepened way with one’s own work or deepening one’s understanding when seeing the great masterworks of the past.

The Bottega Series plans to offer workshops in the following subjects:

1. Hand Grinding and Tubing Oil Paint
2. Hand Made Supports and Surfaces for the Painter
3. Fresco Painting
4. Water Gilding and Gold Leaf
5. Making Crayons and Pastels
6. Egg Tempera
7. Understanding Glazing and Scumbling in Oil Paint

FIRST JSS BOTTEGA : ISRAEL HERSHBERG – WATER GILDING AND GOLD LEAF

January 16th, 23rd and 30th at 7:00 PM, Jerusalem Studio School, 33 Pierre Koenig Street – 5th floor, Jerusalem. Our apologies: We are postponing the Bottega to sometime in late March, early April. New dates to be announced.

WATER GILDING – GOLD LEAF BOTTEGA DETAILS

Slide Lecture: Gold Leaf – The History of Picture and Frame as Object.
Demonstration: Preparing Rabbit Skin Glue and understanding its uses.
Demonstration: Preparing and working with authentic (old master) glue gesso.
Demonstration: Preparing a glue gesso panel as a support for painting or Gold Leaf.
Demonstration: Preparing, applying and polishing red bole clay for gold leaf.
Demonstration: Handling, applying, burnishing, finishing and toning gold leaf.
Demonstration: How to make a 15th century Italian Renaissance style frame using the above methods of gold leaf and a painted granite cassetta field.

This first Bottega is dedicated to the memory of Robert Kulicke – Painter of note and master framer. Kulicke, who passed away in 2007, was the most important and innovative framer of his time.

With special thanks to my friend and former student, Marty Kotler, painter and Head of Frame Restoration at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, for his expert advice and guidance in preparing for this Bottega.

Click to view slideshow.

Participation fee (for the 3 days) NIS 350.00

To register please call the us at (02) 671-9525 or email us at jss@netvision.net.il

Details and participation fees of each Bottega will be announced individually and prior to the event.

Exhibition: Jerusalem Studio School – Gallery Livia

jerusalemss — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 21:52:16 +0000

Roni Taharlev – Heads

The JSS’s new gallery space at 12 Agripas Street, Jerusalem.

Gallery hours: 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM, Sunday – Friday. By appointment: 052-645-3503

Through December 24th

Roni Taharlev’s latest works are discerning and unadorned journeys of self and epoch through the mirrors of the art of ancient Greece, Fayum, Rome and the Renaissance.

Roni is a former student of the JSS and lives and works in the mountaintop village of Matat, in the Upper Galilee.

JSS Master Class End of Year Student Exhibition

jerusalemss — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 10:49:09 +0000

Selected Images

Tomer Amir

Hila Chessen

Oleg Lisin

Rotem Amizur

Kiril Kviatkovski

Ronit Goldschmidt

Lior Levin

Aryeh Lederhandler

Deborah Sebaoun

Shani Sela

Omri Sudri

Lucy Apel

Talia Ben-Abu

Sam Rachamim

Interview with Israel Hershberg

jerusalemss — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 08:15:02 +0000

By: Larry Groff לראיון בעברית לחץ כאן, תורגם ע”י דבי אלון

Originally published in Painting Perceptions

page 1/page 2/page 3/page 4/page 5/page 6/page 7

Israel Hershberg

Israel Hershberg was born in 1948 in a Displaced Persons camp in Linz, Austria. In 1949 he emigrated to Israel with his family and in 1958 moved with them to the United States, where he attended the Brooklyn Museum School in New York. He eceived his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and his M.F.A. from the State University of New York in Albany. He then taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the New York Academy of Art. His awards include: the Sandberg prize for Israel Art, 1991; and the Tel-Aviv Museum Prize for Israel Art, 1997. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. He is currently represented by the Marlborough Gallery in NYC, which is widely recognized as one of the worlds leading contemporary art dealers. Mr. Hershberg lives and works in Jerusalem and is founder and artistic director of the Jerusalem Studio School.

I was fortunate to meet Israel Hershberg this past summer during the Jerusalem Studio School’s Master Class in Italy and asked him if he might agree to an interview here at Painting Perceptions, I was delighted when he agreed. We talked via skype and then had the conversation transcribed. It was further edited by Israel Hershberg for greater clarity.

Larry Groff First of all, I just want to say thank you very much for taking time out of your busy schedule to do this interview with me. A lot of people will be able to read this interview and get a great deal of inspiration and information out of it, so I appreciate it, and thanks again.

My first question is about your early education as a painter. Was there anything that stands out as a pivotal moment that helped shape who you are today as a painter? Anything that would be of note for someone starting out now?

Israel Hershberg “Now” is a huge conversation. I don’t know that we can touch on all the modalities of the “now”‘ but perhaps we can touch on some of them down the line.

I started fairly early. I actually started to study at the Brooklyn Museum Art School while still in high school. Before that, I just drew all the time. I mean, I loved to draw – it was how I spent big portions of my time as a kid and living in New York as I did then provided me with great formative examples of art from antiquity and right up to the present. In addition New York provided some truly singular opportunities to actually meet practicing artists whose work I admired.

As luck would have it, the public high school I attended was for some reason endowed with a relatively sophisticated art department. It was a new school and I was in the first graduating class. It [the art department] even had its own printmaking studio, which was very unusual. I didn’t know of too many high schools that had anything like that, with the exception of these magnet schools like the High School of Music and Art or Art and Design, I guess is what they call them in the States today.

We had an outstanding art department head at this school who brought in teachers fresh out of Pratt, Cooper, SVA and Parsons and for high school seemed to me a cut above art teachers entering public education at that level. They were more than encouraging – I’d say they were intimately involved with my early aspirations to be an artist and I have a great fondness for them to this day.

It was the chairman of that high school art department who told me about the Alliance of Figurative Artists – a meeting of painters and sculptors that gathered every Friday night at the Educational Alliance on East Broadway. That was back in 1967.

These meetings had their start in Al Leslie’s studio and when interest and attendance burgeoned it all moved to the Educational Alliance, as oral tradition would have it.

I was young at the time, around 17, to be attending these meetings but found them incredibly stimulating – everyone there spoke their minds in the most uninhibited terms, you know, there were none of the PC sterilities of public or academic discourse we see today. To me it felt like an art nerd’s equivalent of making the rugby team; very rough and tumble. The atmosphere was always charged and combative with passions really out in the frontmost plane and quite often spilling over the top. The older artists who held sway there were some very serious and established personages. Some I greatly admired then and some I do to this day. I was engrossed by these meetings and at times even thrilled to see and hear them go at it full tilt…

(click for larger view – true for all the images in this article)
“Cow’s Tongue #74″ 1987-1988. Oil on linen, 152.8 x 105 cm Collection: Israel Museum, Jerusalem Israel

LG What kind of battles? What were they arguing about?

IH I don’t know whether you got to read the foreward I recently wrote for the Prince Street Gallery’s 40th anniversary catalog, but I describe there some of the battle lines drawn – and in general this recounting makes for a bit of very formative personal history.

The big divide was roughly made up of followers of Paul Georges and those of Gabriel Laderman, who I think defined the clearest polarities along that divide. And though there were almost always well considered themes assigned to an evening’s proceedings, invariably the recurring sub-theme that popped its head with the most persistence revolved around the virtues of a “loose” or expressionistic approach toward representation vs. a more slow, formally restrained or tempered pictorial approach. I admit to not remembering why that distinction was so important then but the content discussed seemed less compelling at times than the expressions of passionate conviction and the holding forth of artists like Paul Georges, Lennart Anderson, Louis Finkelstein, Rosemarie Beck, William Bailey, Phillip Pearlstein, Aristodemus Kaldis, Gabriel Laderman, Paul Resika, or Leland Bell. Not a one of them was dull and not a one of them to my delight, particularly “open-minded”. It made for great pyrotechnics!

For a young fellow with artistic ambitions, this was was a treasure trove and it went a long way in shaping what I think to this day. I was like a sponge, open, but my personal biases, my inclinations lay more with an artist like Lennart Anderson who did not attend these meetings on any regular basis. I remember perceiving this to be a kind of admirable aloofness on his part. And never will I forget an early retrospective of Lennart’s at Bard College. It was pivotal and shaped my aspirations as a painter deeply.

The Alliance experience I think, went a long way in carving out a position or posture, a mentality, perhaps an ethic that I identified with intensely at this early stage in life, and I was absolutely astounded that the other art students at Pratt, which I attended after high school, arrived with no such thing!

And very pivotal: One of my teachers and dear friend to this day at the Brooklyn Museum School, Francis (Dick) Cunningham, had studied with Edwin Dickinson, an artist whose paintings and drawings really worked my eyes up into a hunger. I’d go look at his work whenever I could and my admiration for it has never waned. I told Dick of my plans to spend time in Wellfleet on Cape Cod with the stated desire of meeting Dickinson. I expected a meeting like this would be somewhat complicated to negotiate, but Dick deftly set it up and at a blink of an eye I set off to Wellfleet.

I did that for a number of summers. I would go there, I’d paint outdoors mostly, sometimes near and around the salt marsh his gray shingle house occupied the edge of, and I’d show him my work. We’d walk to the small studio up the sand dune near the house and we’d talk. I loved that studio! It was full of the objects I recognized from his paintings and drawings. There was also work of his in that room I’d never seen before – I was completely bowled over! He was already quite old and at times he’d drift in and out of coherent conversation but on the whole there was still the impression of a clarity and authority that came from the rigors of a lifetime’s experience, the single-minded pursuit of the art of painting. I understood well the auspiciousness of these moments, knew they’d be enshrined in my consciousness as fortuitous and rare. You can bet on it, what receptivity I had was turned way up to full volume. Dickinson was very much a gentleman of another era, charming, dapper, self-conscious, and authentically the strangest human being I’d meet to this day.

“Clupea Sprattus” 1992. Oil on paper mounted on board, 63.2 x 64.7 cm

So back to Pratt. On my first day there I sensed immediately what lay in store. I insisted on being part of the group that was assigned to Lennart Anderson’s life drawing class. That class was my sole comfort in what turned out to be a very irritating four year stint. Look, I just wanted to paint and draw but you know how art colleges are. You couldn’t even do that then! They put you with industrial design faculty for something they called “3D design”. And if that was not enough, there was also “2D design”. It was Bauhaus trying to get into my house – it was just awful. The rest with the exception of allies I managed to make from among the faculty, you know, exceptionally sympathetic and protective adjuncts, these fine abstract painters like Ernie Briggs, Ed Dugmore and James Gahagan – it was all a dull, dull affair. Ed, Jim and Ernie just allowed me to paint at home. One learned very quickly that the adjuncts were for the most part the ones you wanted to hang with, they were the serious artists, and the full-timers, just academics, rather unexceptional artists frankly, who cared mostly about clawing their way up in the system to power, tenure or both. Amazing what faculty exhibitions can reveal…

My experience teaching for ten years at a similarly inclined Baltimore art college somewhat later, just confirmed this early view by hitting it right out of the ball park.

Well, OK, so much for that. I was living in New York, made it my job to just see as much art in museums and galleries as possible, and traveled abroad to the extent that I could afford it.