Lines, color and war: Painting as a form of healing
By Avishay Artsy
July 8, 2015
In the summer of 2014, images of war filled our television and computer screens as Israel bombed the Gaza Strip and Hamas launched rockets into Israel. Palestinian casualties heavily outnumbered Israeli deaths (more than 2,100 Palestinians compared with fewer than 100 Israelis, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs). As tempers flared and fingers were pointed, media reports of the war’s toll in Gaza were criticized as anti-Israel propaganda.
Los Angeles artist Jaime Scholnick watched the bloody images with horror and helplessness. Not knowing what else to do, she printed out copies of the photographs that filled her Facebook feed, and began drawing over them with a metallic pen and acrylic paint.
Fifty of those images are on display in an exhibition titled “Gaza: Mowing the Lawn,” at the CB1 Gallery in downtown L.A. through July 18. The exhibition’s name comes from a term the Israeli military uses to explain the occasional bombing of Palestinian residents. The number of images corresponds to the 50 days of Israel’s systematic bombardment of Gaza in July and August last year.
“I could have looked away,” Scholnick said in an interview at the gallery. “That’s my problem, I guess. I keep wondering, ‘Are you a masochist? Do you like feeling pain?’ I don’t know.”
The images are abstract, with lines of red, yellow, black, white and blue obscuring the details of the photographs. Yet the emotional impact is felt just as strongly. If anything, the comic-book-like illustrations heighten the drama of the suffering victims. Crying fathers holding their children’s bodies; a group of women in chadors huddled together; clouds of smoke and flame set amid a mosque’s minarets — these images are powerful, regardless of the viewer’s political views.
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