Manege, St. Petersburg, august 1997

.   I would like to explain how I understood the art of painting. I came to Jerusalem from Russia, deeply impressed by the heritage of Theophane the Greek.  Here I met Hedi Tarjan, who shared with me her knowledge of the master, Cimabue, whose teacher was Greek as well.  Here was a meeting of two approaches to art derived from one artistic tradition. I learned from Theophane the Greek and from Andrei Roublev how to build up "tension on the painting surface," creating colours which appear only in rapport with one another.  This tradition did not originate in the teachings of the Church fathers or from official iconography.  The Church fathers taught that every colour was a symbol (i.e. the blue of the Madonna's clothing).  Theophane and Roublev, whose works I visited frequently and with close attention in the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, taught me how to explore colours through the relation between them.  Those great and talented painters discovered another world and thus elevated the icons to an artistic dimension in which there was no need to signify borders and materials through symbolic (gold and blue) objects. Contemplation of the works of Matisse and the young Picasso, exhibited in the Hermitage museum, reinforced my awareness of that "surface tension" which I learned from Theophane and from Roublev. While my fellow painters immigrated to Paris directly from Russia, I was afraid of the confrontation with the "School of Paris" (Ecole de Paris).  In order not to resemble them, I decided in February 1980 to come to Israel.