The art of the leash

Drawing a rare blend of strengths in art and neuropsychology, Lilac Abramsky-Arazi creates vibrant paintings likened to ‘prints of the soul.’

NOVEMBER 24, 2016 12:22

Lilac Abramsky-Arazi (photo credit: Courtesy) — Lilac Abramsky-Arazi

(photo credit: Courtesy)

An artist is always delighted when their work moves the spectator or listener. For Lilac Abramsky-Arazi, movement is an integral and proactive part of her creative process which she hopes will stir the onlooker to engage in some kind of motion-orientated activity – physical, emotional or cerebral.

Abramsky-Arazi’s new exhibition, Restraining the Leopard, opened yesterday at the Bat Yam Art Institute and will run until December 22. The show incorporates a baker’s dozen of abstract acrylic paintings which run to various sizes and span a wide spectrum of hues and dynamics.

The artist brings a range of talents, skills and disciplines to her craft. For starters she has a PhD in neuropsychology, and also maintains a keen interest in dance. Abramsky-Arazi says the confluence of art and her chosen field of science was a natural result of her own mind-set.

“I am a very inquisitive person, and I am constantly looking to investigate and deconstruct things down to their component parts, although not in a cognitive and conscious way, primarily experientially.”

Art by Lilac Abramsky-Arazi (photo credit: Courtesy)

She says that her academic endeavor serves that end well.

“I think I studied neuropsychology in order to be a better researcher, to be curious in a methodical way, to try unpredictable things and to see what they do. My work is a laboratory of emotional and cerebral influences. I investigate processes of deconstruction and construction, processes of emotion and the senses, and I examine how my work impacts on the senses and feelings, mine and other people’s.”

Abramsky-Arazi, whose biography includes exhibitions in the US and UK, previously participated in a group show that focused on the theme of anxiety, and there is a strong emotional undercurrent to this outing too. The artist posits that powerful feelings are part and parcel of the artistic way. “There is tension and pain in my creative processes,” she states.

“Sometimes, when there is a work I am happy with, when it starts taking shape the tension abates for a while. When I start to see that something is beginning to crystallize there is a lapse in the pain.

This process sometimes imbues me with a sense of calm and that is a very special feeling. But it doesn’t always happen.”

Feelings abound every which way you look in the works currently on show in Bat Yam. The zoological titular reference is a psychological case in point.

“The concept of the whole exhibition addresses emotions and intensity of emotions, and how to deal with and live with them.” Abramsky-Arazi contends that we all have a beast within, which needs to be kept in check. “I think about the leopard we all have inside us,” she states.

“Freud searched for some sublimation, to tame it in order to allow a process of socialization to take place. Taming involves trying to change the animal, to diminish its force, to turn it into a cat. You have to cut its talons if you want to restrain it.”

Nonetheless, Abramsky-Arazi feels there is nothing cut and dried about dealing with this emotional equation.

“We have parts that we need to learn to control, and not express – not to bite, or to savage.” But it is not just about keeping powerful forces under wraps.

“We also have to realize – and this is possibly the main point behind the exhibition – that the ability to extend ourselves, in order to be able to accommodate these forces, to understand more clearly what lies inside, and to dwell on this, is restraint. It is a little like martial arts. Getting to know yourself better and achieving a greater degree of self-control enables us to be more instinctive, more creative and more productive, and less dangerous, to ourselves and to our environment.”

The artist does not spoon-feed us.

We have to make an investment in her works, to spend time with them, ponder them and, possibly, feel them and arrive at our conclusions. Part of that is down to the fact that Abramsky- Arazi’s favored visual format is abstract painting. It would be nice and cozy if, for instance, we were to see a leopard prowling through one of her canvases.

That would make it far easier to get the point, but that would also devalue the message, which may then just go in one part of our brain and fly out of another just as rapidly.

“Abstract works don’t allow the observer to rest within a comprehensible form. The eye does not get much respite and, in order to be able to feel and understand [abstract works]. We delve inside our own body and emotions. That is not always an easy thing to do.”

It is a double-edged sword. “That is an advantage of abstract [art], but also a disadvantage because it is not always interpreted,” notes Abramsky-Arazi.

“A friend told me that my paintings are like prints of the soul. My soul is a tempestuous and restless one, but my works don’t address violence. They address dealing with emotion and forces.

They are the raw materials which, if we don’t have the tools to contend with them, turn into violence.”

She says art has been a major part of her life since she was small. “I think you are born like that,” she muses. “I was always a little different. That’s the way I see the world and relate to it.” She says it is an ever-present element.

“That comes through in the games I play with my clothing, with objects I have around me, spaces I am in, through dance and movement, in my illustrations and sketches. I think that art is not just about doing, it is also who I am. I never studied art in an orderly fashion. She is also a dedicated follower of her craft. “I like to observe art and to be influenced by art.”

Most of the works in the Bat Yam exhibition are very colorful affairs, but it wasn’t always like that. “It took me a long time to get to [using] color,” she notes. “Expressing myself through painting, and with color, only came about in the last few years. And it has become an important means of expression in my life.”

Neuropsychology may not seem like a natural bedfellow for painting, but Abramsky-Arazi says they share a common ground on non-verbal expression.

She was also drawn to the research orientation of the science which, she says, has made her a better explorer, in her artistic endeavors too.

While she ostensibly creates two-dimensional works there is a structural, almost sculptural, aspect to her approach.

“I like textures and layers, with rough materials,” she explains.

“I create layers, whereby the material itself is the object. Because I do not paint figurative paintings the actual material is not just a tool or a means for expressing something else, it is an entity in itself. Sometimes I thicken the paint and create layers.”

So, what would Abramsky-Arazi like us to take away from her exhibition? “It would make me happy if people came and, first, saw the paintings with their eyes, but then they would be able to release something inside them and to see the paintings with their heart and their body, and to sense the storm, and to be able to sustain that there.”

Ultimately, it is all about feelings.

“My work is emotional, so I would like people to feel, to stay with their emotion, even if only for a little while. I want people to feel.”

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