Title: Longing
Year Completed: 2021
Size: 22x28 inch (56x71 cm)
Technical: Acrylic on paper

Inspired by Ton Schulten. “When COVID seemed to last forever, and we couldn't even think of visiting our families, I painted this and called it longing. This painting loosely portrays the view from our last home in Israel before moving to Portland. After I finished it, I took a course on Lea Goldberg's poetry and had a chance to re-read her poem “Pine”. I really relate to her experience of immigration and all the beauty and growth as well as the longing and pain it brings”.

Pine / Lea Goldberg (Translated by Rachel Tzvia Back)
Here I cannot hear the voice of the cuckoo.
Here the tree will never wear a cape of snow.
But it is here in the shade of these pines
my entire childhood comes alive.
The chime of the needles: Once upon a timeI called the snow-space homeland,
and the green ice that enchains the stream,
and the poem's tongue in a foreign land.
Perhaps only migrating birds knowsuspended as they are between earth and skythis heartache of two homelands.
With you I was transplanted twice,
with you, pine trees, I grew,
my roots in two different lands