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David Greenfield Artist Statement

Past

Two Worlds: Lacoste exhibiter David Greenfield talks about how his army time shaped his art.

by Richard Von Busack,  San Jose Metro. (May 17, 1990).

Artist David Greenfield is a man of two countries. He’s an American who is intrigued by Israel, who is married to an Israeli woman and who would like someday to return there for good. Indices of both cultures crowd his bookshelves: volumes by Mark Twain (that quintessential scoffer, that sworn enemy of blind faith), a thick commentary on the Book of Job.

Slides of his work bear titles that might well be read as comments on the Middle-East conflict ("No End in Sight" and "Burden of Dreams" are two examples) and some of the paintings in his living room have figures of soldiers inset in geometrical figures. One is something of a self-portrait, he says; Greenfield was a corporal in the Israeli army. Yet he's resolved the tension between hope and fear, between his homeland and his would-be home, in a whimsical piece that will be on display at the Katia Lacoste Gallery: a clock made from a Kellogg's Corn Flake box. The green; best-to-you-each-morning rooster is surrounded by Hebrew characters.

“Yeah, I like the design”, Greenfield says. "When I was in Israeli a few years ago, I found the box. It just seemed so absurd– what's wrong with this picture? I read a book on logos and how companies hire design teams in different countries that try to retain the local flavor of the calligraphy. Arabic, a very, beautiful language to look at, lends itself very well to this sort of thing." 

Greenfield began as a photographer; when he was in high school, one of his photos was exhibited in various sister cities of his native Los Angeles. After he graduated, he went to live in a kibbutz and was drafted. It wasn't until later, when he was an infantryman, that he started sketching, although his camera still traveled with him. Reproductions of Raoul Dufy's pieces were among the first artworks that inspired him to start painting. His paintings have almost a topographical quality, of maps in which the human form is part of the landscape. Squares and quadrangles of earth-toned, roughly textured colors surround figures; one corner might be exposed to reveal a capillary-like web of roads on an actual map. Greenfield frequently uses maps as painting surfaces.

"In the middle of my service,” he says, "! started drawing and painting, and I was drawn towards geometrics. I think it's more of something inside [me] than the Landscapes I saw because for years I had postcards of the Monet Water Lilies, a piece by the post-cubist Macdonald Wright, and Rothko’s White Center. So, I started painting this way when I returned to Los Angeles from Israel. In Santa Cruz [college] I was in geometric heaven. I had teachers that understood what I was exploring before I did, and who provided me with the right kinds of questions and problems.

Greenfield also creates sculptures from found objects: which namely telephone books, which he dissects, varnishing the exteriors and tinting the pages to show what can only be called their anatomy. I'm fascinated with layers,” he says. Without thinking, he mentions a few of these works as "living" with collectors in Los Angeles and London, and the conceit is forgivable– the pieces with their tendon-like lattices, look organic instead of manufactured.

During Greenfield’s last stay in Israel, he spent three months as an artist-in-residence at Hilai, the center for visual arts in Ma’alot-Tarshiha. While he was there, he held workshops with Palestinian and Israeli children in the visual arts and gave demonstrations in Palestinian villages nearby. “Israelis in the verge of change,” he says. “It’s very young– an adolescent country. How the media presents it slants it towards one side of another. When you’re in the midst of it you see are trying to live their lives, trying to change things quietly and effectively instead of standing and screaming, “The Arabs are going to push us into the sea!” There are aspects I love– the cohesiveness of the people when the chips are down, and the chips are down a lot. Also, it’s a great place for raising children.”

I comment on the figures of soldiers in three of his panting. One, titled “Icon” is a self-portrait. The other two resulted from a return to Israel as part of a peace group visiting the [east] end of Jerusalem. It was interesting going back as a non-soldier,” he says. “I took a photograph walking by with a popsicle held away from his body; in the paintings you can’t tell what he’s holding, because I’ve used the outline of the figure.”

“Basically, the idea of soldiers is big in my work.  As a student, I did very anti-war-like paintings– red, orange, very expressionistic– but I found that they were hard to look at, not only for other people but for myself. I wanted to be more subtle. I wanted ideas that would draw you in like a puzzle, and the viewer gets to fill in some of the pieces that I left out. In abstract art, the paintings that I’ve enjoyed the most, the artist has created a set of images that I will never completely understand. Artists present something that they were feeling personally.  My idea of an artist’s primary job is to observe, to absorb and to synthesize. No one is going to know what I’ve done and what I’ve seen, but I can provide certain clues.”

Present

It has been 30 years since this article appeared in the San Jose Metro, and 32 years since I returned from a 6-month stay in Israel, where I spent 3.5 months as an artist-in-residence in Ma’alot-Tarshiha, and 3.5 months painting paintings and murals in Jerusalem, and wandering around the occupied territories meeting with Palestinians in their homes and villages, listening to their stories. I had arrived in Israel in February 1988 at the start of the first Palestinian Intifada, the uprising against the increasingly harsh and violent treatment at the hands of West Bank settlers and the Israeli army. This was 10 years after I completed my mandatory army service and was discharged. For 10 years I watched with horror as the army became entrenched in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank. Despite this, I felt a sense of hope that the government would come to its senses, and would halt the Settler enterprise and pull out. The Israeli left still had some power and a voice. But since that time Rabin shook the hand of Arafat at the White House, and wealthy Jewish and Palestinian businessmen began to invest in a peace economy. But then Rabin was shot by a right-wing extremist, and Netanyahu soon became Prime Minister for the first time and things took a downward turn. It was the time of Shamir and Sharon, working to disenfranchise Palestinians from the homes and land. The Irony Wall was built- I call it that because the Israeli right seemed unable to recognize the similarity of that wall to the walls that were built by the Nazis to contain the Jews of Europe. The settlement enterprise has grown, the Israeli government has greatly increased their harsh treatment of the Palestinians- raiding their villages, towns and cities, appropriating (stealing) their land and properties and talking and planning the annexation of the West Bank.

My heart breaks as I write this. It was not supposed to be this way. My grandfather came to the US from Gomel in Belarus in the early 1900s to escape the Cossacks and secret police. He was a socialist and old-school Zionist who supported the idea of a Jewish homeland where Jews could be safe from the rabid and long-standing anti-Semitism in Europe. He was a man who possessed a deep respect for his fellow human beings (well except for Nazis, Fascists and other anti-Semites), and he would be turning in his grave if he knew what was happening now in Israel/Palestine.

The images in this exhibit represent actions, and events, that I participated in and saw, along with people I've met. For example, the large painting called The Sacrifice is my interpretation of the story of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of his son Isaac. Abraham is walking off to the left, while his son Isaac is on the far right, standing and laughing with his hands in the air making victory signs. The angel is in the center, standing over the dead ram, while God is hovering in the background, pointing to Isaac. The image of the soldier was taken at the entrance of the Kalandia refugee camp, just north of Jerusalem. Isaac is a Palestinian boy standing on the ruins of his home in a village in the West Bank that the Israel army had just destroyed. I am the angel, from a self-photograph, taken in a deserted street in the Moslem Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. And in the role of God is the principal of the main school that hosted the collaborative art workshops that I led with Jews, Christians and Moslems.

Endless Sorrow is a pen-and-ink drawing of the aftermath of the attack on Kfar Yuval by a squad of Lebanon-based Palestinian militants. The figures represent the one Israel killed, being carried by his brother. There are no real victors in this war- Palestinians and Israelis, Moslems, Christians and Jews all suffer.

Peace Gate is a collaborative word painting that I made with several Moslem and Christian children from the Ma’a lot-Tarshiha area. We created stencils of the words  Life, Justice, Truth, and Peace in Hebrew, Arabic and English to create a painting of hope.

Future

The situation in Israel, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon is looking pretty bleak and discouraging, but it is imperative that we do not give up hope, and it is critical to speak louder and work harder for change, and to build societies based on respect, acceptance and peace. This is not an easy task by any means, but it is crucial that we continue to work towards that goal, in all fields. I continue to make art, but my work is now focused on change. I returned to school and earned my MAEd and EdD in learning technologies. I wrote my dissertation on using graphic novels (non-fiction memoirs, biographies and history), and over the past several years, I have led and participated in webinars with teachers around the world, with a goal of introducing people to new cultures and communities on a grass-roots level.

I am currently developing a year-long program called the International Intergalactic Comic Club to bring together young students (ages 10-14) from schools around the world to participate in bi-weekly, web-based classes to share stories, learn about each other and each others cultures and communities, be taught the formal elements of storytelling, and collaborate on creating graphic novels about their lives, cultures, and communities. By the end of the year, the students will not only have had the opportunity to meet and interact with students from different countries and collaborate on writing graphic novels that will be gathered into a volume that will be distributed to all the participants and their school libraries. 

For more information and to see other examples of Greenfield’s art, please visit:
www.davidgreenfield.net


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