Accessorize: The Art Issue

Cover art: Libby Klein
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We were the first of our social group to move back to North America from Yerushalayim. I had one little baby at the time, and I wasn’t working, so I was able to utilize a lot of the time she was napping to revisit my high school love of portrait drawing. I painted a lot.

I think I must have felt a little displaced, in a twilight zone. On the one hand, I was home, back in the neighborhood where I’d grown up. On the other hand, my friends were still pushing strollers in Arzei park together, while my siblings who lived near me were already deeply settled into their multi-child routines – and I was perfecting the uniformity of pumpkin muffins with their sticky-smooth maple glaze, in a different time zone than my friends and on a different schedule than my siblings.

Time moved quickly, as it does. The easel got folded up, the brushes cleaned and dried, we moved, and moved again. It’s been eight years or so since I’ve really invested energy into painting. However, I’ll often doodle with my girls after school, and, aghast that this skill was lying dormant, they were the ones who motivated me to whip out the canvas again.

I’m doing a series of gedolim now — simple techniques, pencil on a sketchpad. My brain filters shadows and facial features into microscopic shapes; the brim of a hat and the veins on a hand are dissected into hundreds of little triangles of varied depth, size, and texture.