JUDAISM & IDENTITY
Works in painting, illustration, and mixed media exploring Jewish identity, memory, and tradition, personal and collective, ancient and urgently present.
“V’ahavta”
Illustration
Leviticus 19:18
2026
I created this piece because I love giving words life, shape, and presence. I filled it with white hearts because we all need more love.
Hidden among them is one broken heart, because pain is part of the picture too.
"Freedom"
Oil pastels on paper
manual engraving
42 X 59.4 cm
2026
This piece was made for Pesach. Parts of the Haggadah are engraved across the surface, winding around the figures like a living text. At the center are doves as a symbol of the Jewish people rising from a dark sky scattered with stars, moving from darkness to light, from slavery into freedom.
The image is rooted in the Passover story but it reaches further than that. Liberation from Egypt is not only a historical event but it is a symbol that belongs to the whole arc of Jewish history. The same movement from darkness to freedom echoes at the Shoah, in the memory of those who survived the concentration camps and walked out.
The dark background is not despair. It is the before. The doves are the after. And the words of the Haggadah wrapping around them are the thread that connects every generation to the same story still being told, still being lived.
"Genesis" #1
Pastel on paper
Manual engraving
21 x 29 cm
2026
This piece is drawn in blue pastel on paper. A deliberate choice, blue as sky, as water, as the space before anything had a name.
It is rooted in Genesis, the opening of the Torah and one of the most foundational texts in human culture - not only Jewish, but the bedrock of three major religions and the origin story that shaped Western civilization itself. The creation of the world. Something from nothing. It is difficult to think of a more universal starting point.
The engraving technique gives the surface a quality of inscription, as if the image itself is being written into existence at the same moment it is being drawn which feels right for a text that is, above all, about the act of creation.
This is a work about beginnings. And about the fact that some stories are so old and so deep.
"The Commandments"
Oil pastels on paper with gold leafs
42 X 59.4 cm
manual engraving
2026
Red was not a casual choice. It is the color of something that demands to be seen. The commandments are engraved into the surface in large letters, each one pressing against the next. Crowded, insistent, as if the weight of all ten together is almost too much to contain on a single page. Which, in a way, it is.
The gold leafs catches the light differently depending on where you stand, which feels right for a text that has meant different things to different people across three thousand years of history. These are Jewish laws, yes — but they became the foundation of entire legal and moral systems far beyond Judaism.
The letters pushing against each other are the point. These are not quiet suggestions. They are a structure : urgent, collective, inescapable and still holding the shape of civilization together whether we acknowledge it or not.
"Without An Evil Eye"
and gold leafs on paper.
Manual engraving
21 x 29 cm
2026
Bli Ayin Hara -
The phrase means without evil eye . A blessing, a protection, a thing you say when something good happens so that nothing comes to take it away. In Hebrew it is Bli Ayin Hara. In Yiddish, Keyn Ayin Hore. In Italian, malocchio. In Arabic, mashallah. Almost every culture on earth has a name for this fear and a gesture to ward it off, which tells you something important: that this is not superstition belonging to one people. It is one of the most ancient and universal expressions of what it means to be human - to love something, and to be afraid of losing it.
At the center of the piece is a large eye, engraved into the surfac. The words wrap around it like an incantation.
This piece lives at the intersection of the Jewish tradition and something much older and wider than any single tradition. A symbol that crosses borders, languages, and centuries and still means exactly the same thing everywhere.
"Maim Rabim"
Oil pastels
21 X 29.5 cm
manual engraving
2026
Many waters cannot quench love, nor will rivers overflow it.
Song of Solomon 8:7. The painting is in hebrew.
Three thousand years ago and it still holds. Love as force. Not sentiment, not decoration, but something stronger than all the forces of nature and the material world. This is the idea at the center of the piece: that love does not yield to circumstance, to loss, to the weight of history pressing down on it.
The hebrew letters are engraved directly into the surface. There is something uniquely physical about painting words, about giving language a body. In engraving, the letters do not sit on top of the paper. They are pressed into it, they take on weight and texture, they seem to grow flesh and sinew.