Welcome to my new website! A home for my book, my art, and little updates about my life in Israel. 

Though I've been writing short stories and plays since I was a little girl, and my first book, The Camel in the Forest, was published two years ago, painting is entirely new to me. I've always been inspired by art, particularly painting; it inspires some of my writing and the visions I have for how I want my life to look aesthetically, but painting always seemed like something other people could do, not something I could ever do. I'm still not sure what was the catalyst for the change, but after my birthday this year, I started sketching with a set of my children's oil pastels and an empty sketchbook I had bought months earlier because I liked the way it looked. I didn't discover any latent artistic genius within me that had been waiting for those oil pastels and the sketchbook, but I did discover artistic ability and an eagerness in myself to learn from my mistakes and create more. For the first time, I was  drawing and sketching without judging myself on the outcome or comparing my skill to other incredible artists who have spent years or decades developing their craft (or might actually possess inherent artistic genius). I keep sketching and drawing resulting in several results I am proud of : sketches of my children, a few landscapes, a fantastical portrait of a woman rising out of flames (perhaps flames of the self-judgment that was holding her back?). None of them are incredible works of art, but they are all my art, and symbols of what I'm capable of icreating if I let my mind freely interpret what inspires me and then trust my hands to do their work.  

I recently picked up a book of watercolor paper and brought out a set of White Nights watercolors that I bought for no reasons on a whim seven years ago. It's a high-quality set that I used maybe twice, taking each color literally and creating washes of color on a few pages before I put it away because it felt like a language I didn't understand and wasn't ready to learn yet. Seven years later, I've taken the watercolor set back out and combined a newly found skill to sketch with a willingness to understand the language of watercolor: a flowing, melding, malleable language that requires much greater trust than oil pastel and pencil. In hindsight, my first few paintings were too controlled; I was using a lot of pigment and less water resulting in clearly outlined images with vivid boundaries of color. These first paintings challenged me to learn about depth perception, shadowing, and how to turn a single-dimension depiction of a scene into a single-dimension painting that still has depth, life, light, and shadow. Fifteen watercolor paintings later, each one has taught me a lesson that builds on the previous painting's lesson. I'm still an amateur painter but I'm now an amateur painter determined to keep learning and better understand the flowing language of watercolor. 

The most important lesson of them all that painting has taught me is to trust myself, not just the process, but to trust the gap between the vision in my mind and the execution of my hand. When I sit down to paint now, before my brush touches the paper, like a prayer, I ask myself, "Do you trust me?" 

Teaching myself to paint and accepting the outcome of my time and skill level has slowly allowed me to work on a project that has lived in my mind for more than six years: a series of mugs featuring paintings of all the national parks and archaeological parks in Israel. The creation of hand-painted designs for all parks and archaeological sites in Israel (despite the country's small size) is a monumental artistic task to set myself to, so I have started to eat the elephant, as they say, bite by bite, starting with the Negev region of Israel, in which I live and have visited (and loved) many of the national parks and archaeological sites.

So may I present, the first in the series of hand-illustrated Israel National Park mugs, the Timna National Park mug. Timna is national park in the Arava region of the Negev desert that spans 70,000 dunams (approx. 17,000 acres) and is home to the famed King Solomon's Mines. Timna Park is known for its almost otherworldly vermillion colored sand and rock formations, ancient petroglyphs, and a rich history of Egyptian copper mining and biblical archaeology. The paintings featured in my design include King Solomon's Mines (Amudei Shlomo), the vanishing lake (HaAgam HaNe'elam), the well-known Mushroom Rock (HaPitria), and the The Arches (HaKshatot) rock formations. 

If you have visited Timna before, I hope this mug can be a cherished souvenir from an enjoyable visit and if Timna is still on your bucket list, then I hope that when you are drinking your daily tea or coffee, this mug will remind you that Timna and all its magic are waiting for you on your next trip to Israel. 

Thank you for being here and thank you for supporting my work.

Until next time, 

Avigail