| Welcome to the official website of Yotam Zohar. |
| News |
| September, 2009: Yotam is making preparations for his next body of work. |
| About the artist |
| Yotam Zohar is an international artist with a background in traditional figurative painting. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree at The Ohio State University and a Master of Arts Degree at Eastern Illinois University. Yotam supplemented his conceptual and theoretical training with private lessons in Classical technique in Europe. He has instructed and lectured on painting, color theory, film, photography, and writing at the university level. His work has been exhibited extensively in the American Midwest, and hangs in private collections in the US and Europe. Yotam is currently living and working in New York City, where he is continually involved in painting, writing, and teaching. |
| Statement |
I paint because I have to. I can imagine no alternative, no better or more meaningful use of my time and energy. I see it as my task to fill gaps in the record of human experience left open by those contemporaries of mine who have instead taken the liberty of self-expression. All around us, there are significant images that have as yet eluded the poem and the photograph. My challenge as a painter is to discover and document these images in ways that only a painting can articulate. While a great many things interest me, the subject matter of my work seems to find me, rather than the other way around. And although I give myself happlily to my work, I am not sentimental about it: beauty is portrayed with the same irreverence and brutality with which it exists in real life, pain with the same graceful grandiosity. I embrace these contradictions because they are extracted directly from the world, unfiltered and unmitigated in their transition to the canvas. |