When did you decide to become an artist and what happened next?

At the age of 15 I understood that I wanted to be an artist. I was a problematic kid and the only thing that interested me was surfing and riding my BMX bike. In the 80s I was the Israeli BMX champion. I never drew but from an early age everything that I did was eccentric. Being this way allowed me freedom to be and to be inspired by movies, songs and magic. At age 14 I was thrown out of school and decided to go to art school since it was close to the beach where I grew up and not because I was interested in art. In fact I’d never picked up a paintbrush in my life. I was accepted only because I’d borrowed the neighbour in my grades, drawings and paintings. I got In and the truth was I had no idea how to paint. In the first And following years I didn’t really study, I didn’t take this place seriously. In conjunction with practicing painting, drawing and sculpture we also had the academic component and we studied art history from the beginning of time. From cave paintings to the Egyptian Empire and by the end of the first year we arrived at the Renaissance Era. Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rafael….these were the catalysts of my awakening. These figures deeply fascinated me and all of a sudden my whole world was blown open and my life transformed in an extreme manner. Within a few months I was unrecognisable to my friends and family and even to myself. Everything in my life at that point changed…my hair color, my skin color (I never saw the sun for a few years) my perspective on life and the music I listened to. The first books I began to read at age 15 were Nietzsche, Spinoza and Freud. I started to paint in an obsessive way and to write and ask questions, So many questions. In my second year I became one of the best painters in the school, I still to this day cannot comprehend how this all happened…it’s simply magic. It’s a very Forrest Gump fairytale. Since age 15 art is the only thing that I do and I couldn’t be more grateful that it found me, I understand what a gift and privilege it is to be an artist.

I’d like you to tell me more about your last project “The life you left behind”?

After doing all the mother paintings with repetition and 102 portraits of geniuses children I understand that I can longer work with images of people, not my own, no one. But I knew that I wanted my work to deal with people. I started to work with the concept of a person who is so tempting that you want to touch them but they are untouchable, unreachable. I began to think about the meaning of painting today, how the artwork should function. We live in a time when images are accessible without limits- thanks to smartphones, the whole world is in our hand. In addition, people are obsessed with themselves. Wherever we go we have to take a smiling or sexy selfie of ourselves freezing moments after moments… when standing in front of my chromed canvases, the viewer sees only themselves in the reflection. The paintings do not exist without the viewer. The viewer becomes a part of it. And people are happy to see themselves in a painting. They see themselves as a work of art. There is something from Dorian Gray in these works (subject I always work with) … in an interesting, distracted, emotional, metaphorical way. Today, in the time of the pandemic, the title “The Life We Left Behind” now has such a spiritual and poetic meaning. We all left behind the life we used to have in so many ways.