The New Jersey-born painter known only by her first name – Ma’ayan, Hebrew for “wellspring” – found the junction of her creative and spiritual journey in Jerusalem.
On the creative side, she started art lessons at eight. As a young adult, she honed her craft in New York at the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design.
Her spiritual side also got early nurturing, thanks to the subtle influence of her paternal grandmother, whose Orthodox rituals and Friday night dinners (“We never called them Shabbat dinners”) touched the young girl’s soul. She was 28 when her grandmother passed away, leaving Ma’ayan with an inner longing for something she couldn’t yet name.
Ma’ayan: From New York to Jerusalem, 2012
By that time, she had a degree in graphic design and advertising from the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she minored in fine arts. She moved to Manhattan, continued painting on Saturdays at the Art Students League, and began teaching at the Montclair Museum of Art while working her way up the ad agency ladder as a creative director.
“With the passage of time, I sought to fill my spiritual void by taking basic Judaism classes. I learned about the deep, soulful beauty of the heritage I never knew. I found my own place in the warmth of the Reb Shlomo Carlebach community on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where my heart was opened up to Hashem and the Torah,” she says.
Experiential abstraction
Her creative and spiritual paths began converging. “It was not a conscious decision to bring these two worlds together,” she says. “It naturally evolved, as both speak from the heart.”
Eventually, Ma’ayan decided to leave her full-time advertising career and devote herself primarily to painting while proceeding step by step toward Orthodox observance.
“That decision was huge. But just when I had closed those doors, it felt like Hashem was opening new doors for me – I received two major, highly coveted art grants from the Art Students League. This was a confirmation that I had made the right decision.”
One of these grants enabled her to spend five life-changing months sketching and painting in the art capitals of Italy, France, Spain, and Germany. The second grant took her to the Marchutz School of Art in Aix-en-Provence, France.
“It was at the Marchutz School that my voice as an artist started to blossom,” recalls Ma’ayan. “Over the following years, my style moved from more representational and expressionist to what I call ‘experiential abstraction.’ All my paintings have an emotive, inner light and depth that allows the viewer to become immersed in the piece as they are drawn to become one with the painting.”
Each of her series originated with a shock, a transformative event in her life. Large in scale, ranging from 1.2 meters to 1.7 meters, her paintings straddle a middle ground between abstract secular art and traditional Jewish art. They are rooted on the one hand in her academic background; on the other in Jewish sources, including the weekly Torah portion; Psalms; and Perek Shira, Perek Shira, an ancient Jewish text in which elements of nature sing God’s praises.
“My paintings are not religious. What I gravitate to is not so much the message of the black-and-white text of the Torah. It is more the white space that lives in between the letters, which embodies the essence of the Scriptures. This space, for me, holds the spirit, the feeling, the soul of the text. It is this experience that I look to capture,” she says.
Finding home in Jerusalem
Ma’ayan’s new book, Hineni: An Artist’s Journey, presents her artistic story in words and paintings.
Twenty-eight of these paintings comprise her solo exhibition, What Lies Beneath, open free to the public from September 8 through October 21 on the third floor of the Hechal Shlomo Museum of Jewish Art next to the Great Synagogue – a few blocks from her studio at The Social Space on Achad Ha’am Street.
Jerusalem has been her home and inspiration for 14 years.
“I had wandered around the world, from Bali to Mexico, looking for something that I didn’t find. New York City was where I lived, but it wasn’t my home. When I came to Israel the first time almost 20 years ago, for a friend’s wedding, I stopped looking. I fell in love with the people and the land. I knew I was home and could stop wandering.”
She didn’t move right away because her father was gravely ill; after his passing in 2010, she created a painting series in her New York studio in his memory entitled Zalman’s Suite.
Finally, in 2012, she and her husband realized their dream of permanent relocation to Israel. A year later, the Israeli government awarded Ma’ayan a special artist grant as a “unique and exceptional talent.”
Rising from the ashes
Twenty-six of her works that were displayed at Marrache Fine Art Gallery in 2013 were the only ones spared from a devastating fire that reduced her first studio to ashes. In the fire, more than 50 of her oil paintings plus “countless” color and black-and-white oil sketches were destroyed.
“For months and months afterward, I couldn’t paint,” she says. “I asked my husband to go and video the remains of my burned studio and gather all the charred wood, broken glass, bits of canvas, to bring back to me.”
When she finally resumed working, she created a series of paintings and sculptures from those smoky fragments, entitled Out of the Dark.
A couple of years after the fire, a friend introduced Ma’ayan to curator Galit Zimbalist, who has since curated many of Ma’ayan’s group, solo, and Biennale exhibitions in Israel.
Zimbalist, who says she believes Ma’ayan’s art “can bridge gaps and open a window to new understandings of Jewish identity in both local and global contexts,” also curated her Hechal Shlomo show.
“This exhibition speaks about the parallel journey of an artist finding her voice as a Jewish woman and finding her voice as an artist,” says Ma’ayan, who has won 13 international awards, grants, and fellowships throughout her career.
Since the fire, she has created series including The Wanderers, Between Worlds, Where Do We Go from Here, and Continuum, which are on her website, ma-ayan.com. Selected works can also be viewed at Rosenbach Contemporary Gallery in Jerusalem.
She is now working on a new figurative series in which each painting tells the story of a woman and the significant life moment that shaped her. “These paintings say something about how an experience, positive or painful, made these women who they are.” ■
The gala opening of Ma’ayan’s show, combined with a book launch event, is scheduled for September 22 at 7 p.m. at the Hechal Shlomo Museum of Jewish Art.