In 2001, I felt I wanted to explore connections and overlaps between abstract art and Jewish ideas and that a learned guide might help me. I contacted professor Arnold Eisen, then Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University, (with whom I had studied briefly) and asked him to work with me.
Professor Eisen agreed to find a way to collaborate with me. We worked without a clear plan: we spoke in my studio, looked at my abstract paintings, and Eisen listened as I spoke about color, light, unity, and dynamics. He understood that my paintings were anti-image paintings; a viewer was meant to experience a visual process, to apprehend the “becoming” of abstract unity, not to see an image. Over a year of studio visits and cross-country phone conversations, we read Torah, I painted on the basis of our study and he came to new interpretations that became commentaries.
Eisen (and I) did a close reading of the (Hebrew) text of Exodus 33-34, the central Torah text in which Moses asks to see the Glory of G-d on Sinai. My painting philosophy influenced Eisen’s reading of a section he had read so many times. Reading Torah in the studio, attentive to the questions of a visually focused artist allowed him to consider the subject of vision in a new context. The richness of specific words and meanings in the ancient Hebrew allowed me to paint with a different understanding of Formation.
I believe we created a hybrid form of Torah study and art. I had wanted the sense of insight that one can feel when looking at art to join with Torah insight. The resulting paintings and Eisen’s Commentary became “Seeing Sinai: Meditations on Genesis 33-34.” We showed the collaboration in a series of Jewish art venues and the project has been the subject of many articles in Jewish publications.
New Translations: Genesis was my response, as an abstract painter, to the new translation of Genesis by Robert Alter. Alter created a translation that revives the physicality of the original Hebrew. In color-based abstract collages, I made seven pieces for the seven days, trying to recreate through visual experience the interactions of light, matter and (some reflection of) Divine intention operating on/in that primordial day.