1/6/99

Come to Israel and see the uaimh

    Ten tourists were here from Ireland recently. You couldn't guess what had their flabbers gasted.
    They did the usual stuff, from the Golan to Masada, but one after the other, they talked about ... the Flour Cave.
    The what?!
    We've been bracing for Jerusalem Syndrome messianic crazies, and along comes this mix of Jews, Protestants and Catholics, and it's the Flour Cave by the Dead Sea that got them excited.
    Perhaps I should mention, they're all artists.
    Oh. Artists.
    They were brought here by the JNF for a whirlwind 10-day cultural junket, to observe, photograph and sketch, before going back to the Emerald Isle to create art. What they paint and sculpt will be sold in Dublin in the presence of the Irish president, with proceeds going to JNF.
    The only real gripe the visitors had was the "kaleidoscopic" view of Israel whirring past them. They didn't get to sense the seasonally evolving tint of the air, the rhythm of the people, the subtleties of a turbulent land that can bewilder an artist more accustomed to whispering fields of clover.
    Relaxing and recollecting toward the end of their journey in the hotel lounge at Kibbutz Ramat Rahel, where they were encamped, the 10 waxed exuberantly about this place we call home. But unlike most first-time tourists, they didn't speak much about the postcard sites.
    "It's utterly different" from Ireland, said Bernadette Madden, a prominent batik artist. "There, it rains a lot, so the land is lush. At the Flour Cave, it was like a lunar landscape, it's not like of this Earth. The whole Dead Sea area is so alien to anything we have at home."
    She noted the "very strong shadows," and the harmony of Jerusalem's buildings, "that beautiful blond stone. In Dublin, we use gray granite, or red or yellow brick. The city's been ruined by new buildings, because there's no control over the esthetics, but in Jerusalem, the modern buildings don't jump out at you, there's a unifying quality."
    Her thoughts wandered back to the Dead Sea. "Along the banks of the sea there's a modern salt extraction plant, and an abandoned one, and both of them were of great interest, funnily enough, because of the juxtaposition of the very alien landscape with this ultra-modern plant, and then further down the derelict buildings.
    "Everybody got out of the bus at that stage and did some drawings." It is the desert area she expects to render when she gets down to working in her studio.
    Somehow the subject of Canada came up, and the weirdest coincidence occurred. "Don't remember who," quoth I, "but someone once said, 'It'll be a great country when it's finished.'"
    "My uncle Brendan said that," John Behan responded. 
    Brendan Behan's nephew is a sculptor. When the Group of Ten got to Mea Shearim, he said "Aha!" He had found his inspiration.
    "I noticed the Orthodox people. I've got enough ideas for seven or eight pieces."
    Yes, he said, I can sculpt in black.
    He plans to bronze the haredim in the mold of Leopold Bloom, the Jewish James Joyce character. "They fascinate me. I see them as forms, rather than faces."
    Behan gave me over to the group's very own Leopold Bloom, Gerald Davis, a prominent artist who is not only a Jewish Dubliner like Bloom, but has played the part of his fictional townsman.
    Davis grew up as "moderate Orthodox" in the Bnei Akiva movement, and has been here eight times, so he wasn't gaga like the first-time visitors were. "The more I came to Israel, the more Irish I felt," he said, though "the [Western] Wall is still a hugely emotional place for me."
    Davis assembled this little traveling artist colony. "These are people you don't explain things to, you have to show them, and then let them make up their own minds."
    And what diverse minds there were. Two of the artists gave such opposite impressions of Israel, it was hard to believe they were both speaking of the same place.
    "It's very bland, color-wise, very bleached. There's nothing there," said Gwen O'Dowd, allowing that it was "a superficial view. We didn't have the time to experience it all." She was seeking what she called "uaimh. It's an Old Irish word meaning interior space. That's what I'm working on now: cave-like images." For her especially, the murky Flour Cave was a thrill.   
    O'Dowd and Carey Clarke were like night and day. Clarke is a distinguished realism landscape painter and past president of the Royal Hibernian Academy. 
    "The colors are extraordinary," he said, lively blue eyes punctuating his exuberance, "particularly looking at the light of the sky and the sunlight on the hills, and the changing subtlety of the contrasts. You could hardly see the mountains across the Dead Sea towards Jordan but they had a sort of veiled presence. The clarity, the absolute clarity of the water, the intense blues, and greens and manganese.
    "Then we went into the desert and we were looking down on some minor buttes and they were white, so white. In the shadowed areas, the ochres, pale crimsons, and rose, fading into blues and violets. And there was one particular part, looking away toward the industrial area, and it was sort of black, and smoky, and dirty and smoggy, and I thought that was amazing. Then when we were coming back and looking out at the Judean Desert, everything was the palest, palest cream, and bluey tinges, and pale, pale ochres. Extraordinary!"