Shoshana Schwinger Rubinstein brings color to the canvas of life
Art has been my world for as long as I can remember. It’s a gift passed on by my talented father, Rav Kasriel Dovid Kaplan ztz”l, though he was known much more for his gadlus in Torah and joie de vivre than his latent artistic talent. From as young as five, I’ve been constantly fascinated by the world around me: by nature, by color, by emotion, by nuance, like the creases in a tallis or the intricate hues of autumn. While an optimist by nature, life has taken me on many rides — some joyful and some bumpier ones — and through it all, art has been my constant. To date, I have enough work to fill multiple art galleries and plaster the walls of my home.
I started teaching art at around age 16 when I was still a high school student at London’s Lubavitch High School. In the UK, art as a subject is traditionally compulsory in the first two years of high school, and then becomes an elective chosen by a percentage of students in the upper years. The staff would notice me helping out classmates, and sometimes also the younger girls, so when the art teacher was absent, they asked me to stand in. I’ve been teaching — and producing art — ever since.
I thrive on experimenting, so I’ll use practically any medium I can get my hands on: kitchen sponges, scraps of linen and leather, ballpoint ink, and of course a whole array of paints and brushes.
Thirty-five years in the teaching field have taught me that everyone can produce something. Of course you’ll always have those who are naturally more artistically inclined, but what with sponge painting, dragging, paint pouring, or another such forgiving method, anyone can learn art if they want to. Sometimes I’ll even take ripped artwork from frustrated students and arrange and layer it to help them produce something else that’s beautiful; you wouldn’t even know that anything else was at play.
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