I never thought to be a painter I wasn’t interested in painting nor in art in general till the age of 38, then after viewing my scribbling with our little kids I was persuaded by my wife that I have to be a painter, when I resisted she suggested that at least I deserve a short workshop to examine if her hunch about my new virtue was right, my first encounter with art was in front of still life monument, a pair of oranges, a monochrome towel and a branch with two dying leaves, I felt like those leaves, I was bored to death, so was the next lesson, but I still remained in the same course for three months, just to conclude that it’s not for me. At this time in a very awkward situation, I met with Shlomo Tzafrir, an old Israeli master that became my mentor for the next seven years, in his Spartan studio in the 9000 years old city of Jaffa I started learning the basics of drawing, for the first year I worked only with pencils for the second year only with charcoals, then the basics of proportion and figurative drawing. Tzafrir had huge artistic knowledge accompanied by a furious bad temper and with a golden and caring heart so he could through on me paints and brushes and a few minutes later he could cry when one of my lines finally succeeded. From a very early stage of our studies I told Tzafrir that my passion is in deep space and I dream about painting stars and galaxies, on that he replied:
a blind man can feel the Sun’s warmth and light but he could never visualize the Sun, first he has to open his eyes and simply see.
I continued to be considered a blind man till one rainy day Tzafrir announced dramatically that it‘s about time I’ll choose a starry object, my first and last deep space painting I made with Shlomo Tzafrir was the Eagle Nebula pillars, one of the most famous images sent to Earth by the Hubble telescope, my master died a few months later, few days before he collapsed he told me:
The fingers that hold the brush are but a tool, it’s the soul anguish to be expressed that makes your hand move just try not to interfere
After the Shivaa (seven days of mourning in the Jewish tradition) I started to paint my own galaxies, I used oil colors on the canvas, till a friend taught me that in art there is a benefit in using contradicting ingredients that reject each other like water and oil, my first water-oil deep space paintings were made in 2004, then accidentally or as I put it ‘not accidentally’, a jar of tar dropped on my canvas and I was so amazed about the effect of tar in my paintings. In my first tar paintings, I used only tar, then one day a can of red acrylic color, that was ready for another painting fell on my fresh tar canvas, the mixture was disgusting, it seemed like the red acrylic is floating and pushing the brownish tar, so the red got a darker shade and in part disappeared, the next day I saw the red acrylic again form like bubbles in the tar, I decided to make an experiment that turned to be the basis of my FLY technique, I spread the red acrylic first on the canvas and then purred tar, the tar seemed to be too heavy, so I deluded it with turpentine, it was a very strange mixture like nothing I have seen before in my life, I decided to put everything aside, I bought quantities of canvases and began my experiments of tar-acrylic relations and combinations, the more I deluded the tar the more inspired I become, I saw strange enigmatic black spreads of dark tar floating within the moving acrylic. Acrylic dries very fast tar very slowly, so the canvas continues to work while those two aspects interweave, in one of my experiments I went out of canvases, I decided to sacrifice an old acrylic-oil canvas, purred my bright yellow acrylic with deluded tar, I planned to experiment more that day, but then there was an accident near my home, I ran to the street to see if I can help, it was nothing serious but I met my neighbor and my mind was destructed, I hadn’t come back to my painting that day, but the next day when I saw the result, I was so excited that I worked all day long, I found out that the first acrylic-oil level could be seen as the basis of the new tar- acrylic level, so I took some more of my first acrylic-oil canvases and added tar-acrylic layers, then I thought why not making another acrylic-oil level on top of the second tar-acrylic level, and so I prepared an oil can and acrylic can, and while thinking to pure them together a bit of oil was split on a tar spot, the two ingredients had a tremendous interaction both oil colors and tar are deluded with turpentine they merge with unexpected residual forms. From this, my FLY technique emerged.
Now I had oil-acrylic-tar mixtures in every layer. I tried to return to my original passion the deep space but I found out that this technique is too dispersed and I can’t manipulate the colors to the galactic shapes I wanted. At this period, we renovated our house, I helped the handyman to straighten the walls, we used Gypsum and spatula, I loved working with those ingredients. because my studio was on the roof balcony, where all the building materials were stored when I started my next day work I mixed a bit of Gypsum in water and with the spatula engraved the outlines of the spiral galaxy shape, I was so amazed by this new tool that I ran to the nearest building store and bought a bunch of spatulas, narrow, wide, long-short, elliptic, rectangular, this was the Gypsum-spatula period, I used more and more canvases shaping on them wide varieties of forms and images, I came back to my figurative period and shaped human faces, human organs, cats, elephants with all kinds of Gypsum from very soft deluded with a lot of water to solid rock with special Gypsum glue added.
the end of our home renovation marked the end of the Gypsum–spatula era all that was left for me to do was to renovate our furniture with lacquer, but I kept delaying it.
On one of my first Gypsum-spatula canvases in which I shaped a spiral galaxy I started to pure the acrylic-oil-tar layers, something went wrong with this canvas, the colors and shapes didn’t merge, I left this canvas for a couple of days then returned to it for another layer that made it even worse, I decided that this canvas would become the basis for a totally new painting in the future.
finally, I couldn’t resist my wife complaints about the old furniture that awaited a refreshing coat of lacquer, I started to brush all our old furniture, then I discovered that there are colorful transparent lacquers, so I did the first experiments on my furniture when I decided to try the green lacquer I was just about to finish my red lacquer, I had about a fifth of red lacquer can diluted with turpentine, I needed the can for the green lacquer (because I use a small amount of lacquer) so I purred it on the unsatisfying canvas that awaited to be erased, the result was stunning, the transparent red lacquer gave a feeling of a whole new dimension, like gluing all the ingredients together, suddenly it became one of my best paintings.
Now it was the time to join all those ingredients in a coherent technique,
The basis is Gypsum (water-diluted & glue) shaped images
The colors are stirred only on the canvas, I use sushi sticks in order to move the colors on the canvas
The whole painting is constructed from layers each layer contains tar — turpentine, acrylic — water, oil colors — turpentine, in some layers I use lacquer (sometimes water-based most of the times oil-based, lacquer is always used in the final coating of every painting.
Because of the unexpected shapes and forms in this technique, I use as a final layer white acrylic color and with spatula shape again the original image by covering unplanned spills
From 2009 I started to deliver the FLY — Free the Life within You workshops around the world. The FLY workshops have to do with the ‘oops’ that make our lives so interesting and full of magic
Have magic in your life
Ted Barr
