The Paintings The Surface: The surface on which i paint is made of layers upon layers of bits of fabric and paper glued together with acrylic medium. For making the surface i choose fabrics and papers that carry some emotive charge: worn out pants, embroidered or lace-fringed shirts, hand written notes, pornography, school notebooks, medical textbooks. The first piece i made using this material was a life-size human figure with a plastic bag in its chest that would inflate and deflate at four second intervals. All one could see about the figure was the slight inflation and deflation of the chest. Shelf paintings: Still-Life in the vein of Cotán or Morandi, that most retiring of genres, understands that showing the truth about important things is impossible. Life, Love, Death, Society, God, are too big and contradictory to be truthfully summed in a work of art. Showing something absolutely true about a few simple objects arranged on a shelf is enough challenge and itself just barely possible. Soldier paintings: As a child i loved to play with these soldiers and even shoplifted them from the neighborhood toy store. Tin soldiers were the first industrially produced toys. Since then, through various material and design changes, armed "action figures" have remained a mainstay of the toy industry. Children like violence. They buy violence. They identify with the toy soldiers. They want to shoot and chop and smash "the others." As adults we understand the price of violence. We teach children to "play nice" and scold them for hitting each other. But as adults we create and consume violence on television and in movies; we are the ones who wage wars. In the paintings i explore the troubled territory between toys and soldiers, aggression and its containment, war and art. Crane paintings: In Israel, a country with particularly high population growth, cranes can be seen in every skyline. They have become a kind of Zionist symbol. i am fascinated by the cranes, by their lacework trusses, their ponderous long arms. It amazes me that they don't just fall over. There is a quirky kind of hope in their sheer improbability. In the paintings i show them as lonely hulks, like crosses at Golgotha. Tired giants. Dying: i made these at a home for the terminally ill, painting the portraits right there by the beds.