My paintings are a journal of my inner life, capturing the dynamic conversation between me and the world through color and line.
Portraiture is my way of acknowledging the individuals in my life—a living record of interconnectedness. I treat landscapes as a form of portraiture, seeking to see the land with love, as itself, free of human drama.
Living in Israel, I viscerally experience the porousness of our interconnectedness, the immersion of personal experience within the collective. It is as though I am a drop of water in an ocean of national grief, fear and love. As I turned to art to process these experiences, my approach to art as a diary increasingly takes shape as a turn to self-portraiture — a way of locating and anchoring myself within a collective, while finding that self permeated with the collective.
I view the intimacy of these paintings, these living diaries, as an invitation to step closer into the particular, and to find within the particular the thread of a greater whole.
— Safira Klein