LERA (VALERIJA) BARSHTEIN
LANDSCAPES
I have always loved painting landscapes. At the end of each academic year, the pupils at my arts studio – and, later, the students at the Moscow Arts School – would be taken to plein-air sessions in old Russian cities: Pereslavl-Zalessky, Yaroslavl, Zaraysk, and Zagorsk. There, we lived and painted landscapes. Our surroundings were incredibly beautiful, and they have stayed with me to this day.
Soon after coming to Israel, I went off to do some sketches, filling my painter's case with the standard amount of paints that I had used in my plein-air days. To my surprise, I quickly ran out of paints, because the Israeli landscape was utterly unlike the Russian one. I had to deal with a new and unfamiliar reality...
The vividness of the colors, the bright sunlight, and the blue SKY. The sky dominated everything, covering everything like a lid on a pot. Its blue was so amazingly deep. Under this sky, clots of blinding white were being melted (the so-called "Jerusalem stone", which is used in every building).
I had to restructure my approach, and I'm all the better for it. A new stage in my artistic development began. My works have become much more vivid. They now have more heat, brightness, light...and freedom.