Sculpting with a smile: Tamar Eytan reflects on her life’s work

By ARIEL DOMINIQUE HENDELMAN
Tamar Eytan among her creations. (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
Tamar Eytan among her creations.
(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
Tamar Eytan sits in her studio in Jerusalem’s Nahlaot neighborhood with a green fedora perched on top of her head and her devoted daughter at her side. At 98 years old, Eytan has been creating creatures all her own with her hands, out of clay, stone and even felt, for over 80 years.
Many of the creatures are almost grotesquely beautiful; with amorphous heads that extend down to their feet. They are crude yet exact; profoundly intriguing. Eytan speaks sparsely and quietly, with the wisdom of many decades hanging from each word like cloaks, and the slightest touch of humor, as if to say that it’s not all that serious anyway. And even if it is, she has seen enough to know it doesn’t have to be.
Eytan immigrated to Israel in 1924 when she was five. Her parents came from Poland.
“I had no connection with Poland; I don’t remember it,” she says. “At that time, maybe also today, certain countries were more prestigious to come from and others not so much. Poland was not thought of as prestigious, so I never said I was from there. I was very dark-skinned and my hair was curly, so I could get away with it. I also never spoke Polish. I would say I understood a little Yiddish. But it was always Hebrew, so that I was welcome.”
Eytan grew up in Tel Aviv by the sea. When she recalls her youth, the first memory that comes to mind is swimming in the vast waters of the Mediterranean. Her family lived very near to the sea and she loved to go and swim.
“Nobody could tell me not to do it,” she adds. “I was a free bird. My mother couldn’t say anything and my father was always on my side. I was not even properly dressed most of the time and I was not ashamed. When I remember my youth, it was wonderful.”
As Eytan remembers it, art was something that was always there inside her. She started out drawing in secret under her desk, since her school did not offer art classes. If she was caught, the teacher would destroy it, and she would start all over again. Clay was a medium that Eytan had not yet discovered; her art was focused on paper in the beginning.
“At school, we had to use B12 pencils,” she recalls. “I stole my father’s shaving razor to sharpen my pencils and I broke it in two. That was my instrument with which I was working. It’s a pity I didn’t keep it as memorabilia. My father tried to keep many of my early works, but my mother thought it made clutter so she threw them away.”
When Eytan was about 12 years old, she discovered the joys of working with clay. There were courses offered in Tel Aviv outside her school and she eagerly joined them. She asked the teacher where to get the clay and was told to go to the Yarkon River. Despite being shy to go and collect the clay, she did it. Eytan would journey every Saturday with a bucket and bring it back full to work at the house.
“My mother never said anything and my father said it was all right, even though it wasn’t very clean,” she adds.
Eytan’s next artistic period involved working with stone. She loves how challenging it is; how it refuses to give. When Eytan was still in her youth, her family used to go up north to Metulla in the summers because the heat was less oppressive. On the drive up, the roads were lined with hills of basalt, a type of stone frequently used by sculptors.
“My dream was to touch it and to work with it, but there was no one to bring it home for me and help to show me how to work with it,” Eytan recalls.
“I was shy. I was already older and married by the time I finally did. I asked my husband to bring me stone and he brought it to me. I didn’t know what tools you need. But when somebody has in their head, this is what they have to do, they find a way.”
Eytan stopped working with stone about 20 years ago because it became too difficult. There were periods over the years where she switched to wood and loved itvery much. But that medium also became too difficult about 10 years ago.
Eytan returned to working with clay when she and her husband moved to Beersheba, where they lived from 1960 to 1973. During this time, she also taught art, an experience that had a tremendous effect on her and her students.
“It’s the way you teach that’s important; the way you make it interesting for the others,” Eytan explains.
“I had my own studio with three rooms. One for exhibitions of my work and the other rooms were classrooms for children and adults. This approach was unique. I would ask what they wanted to do today and which material did they want to choose: metal, cloth or clay. We also worked with fire, fusing the metal. People would ask me how I could let children 8 to 10 years old play with fire, but they didn’t know I was standing behind the door watching them to make sure that they were doing it properly. It was fun for them. I got letters for years about how the teaching touched people, opened them up and allowed them to get in touch with their souls. I still get letters.”
Eytan moved to Jerusalem in 1973 and has lived there ever since. Her husband was the manager of a company that made brackets for iron stoves in steel factories, which happened to use clay. He offered to bring her clay to work with him and to fire it for her. This enabled her to go back to working with clay full force.
“He is to blame,” she adds comically. “I didn’t have to go to the river anymore. He was very encouraging.” In the late 1970s Eytan began experimenting with working with cloth as well. She felt that she had become empty and needed to make an artistic change. Her cloth work was exhibited at the Israel Museum in the Youth Wing during this time. Some works were three-dimensional and the children could climb on them. The curator was very impressed and asked if Eytan would give a lesson in the technique. She agreed and a few women came to learn.
“I started to teach them, and after a short while, I was left with only two. They didn’t think it was so interesting I guess. But the curator still thought it was, so she brought more people. I taught a class regularly on the cloth work for some time. I also made sculptures out of linen thread. It’s a masterpiece that nobody will ever try because it’s tedious. But time is not the issue for me. Once I start, I have to finish, that’s all.”
Eytan’s artwork took an intensely political turn in the late 1990s and 2000s. She became very politically and socially involved and had four exhibitions over that period, all of which were about politics.
The first, in the Jerusalem Theater, was called “Micah, Chapter 3,” referencing the prophetic visions of the biblical Micah, where he speaks about the corruption in Jerusalem.
Eytan had another exhibition called ”Metamorphosis of a Vision,” which drew on themes from prophets such as Isaiah. The sculptures were made in protest of Israel’s wars.
Then she created the “Tombstones” exhibition in 2011. It wasn’t about any specific war, but about what she terms the “non-peace process,” as well as protesting the treatment of refugees from Africa and how they were put into camps. The following year, 2012, she created “And They Will Not Speak For Me,” with 120 clay figures, each modeled after a Knesset member. The exhibition was displayed outside on the large balcony of the elderly home where Eytan now lives. She refers to it as an open-air gallery.
Her most recent exhibition was called Mishkenot Sha’aninim (Habitat). In Hebrew, it means to live somewhere safely, but it also means a place to be buried. The sculptures are completely different from her earlier work, reflective of her ever-changing aesthetic and talents. Eytan has a set of three angels from this time period as well that were made first in clay and then done again in bronze. The angels represent peace; the ideal of humans. She doesn’t work in bronze, she will work in clay or wood, and then decide that something deserves to be in bronze as well.
Eytan loves to add small signature items to her sculpted creatures, like glasses, cigars or even knives.
They have distinct personalities and she often creates them in groups. Her latest fixation is hats; all the clay creatures must have hats, which she makes out of clay and thus become part of the figure, as opposed to something that simply adorns it.
“Keep smiling. If you lose your sense of humor, you have nothing to do here,” Eytan concludes.
“I hope that people who know me, know that you can tell me anything and I’ll smile. I won’t say laugh, but I’ll smile. At my age now, I have to work. I can’t repeat the same things that I’ve already done. I never went only one way in my art. So I play with the hats now and it’s fun and funny for me.
“Most of the time, I wake up in the middle of the night and work. In the middle of the day I can fall asleep, and at night I’m working. It’s not so organized, but this is how I do it now, it helps me very much and gives me a good reason to go on.”
www.tamar-eytan.com


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