Welcome to Jaffa

Located not far from the Jaffa Port, on a street that, for many years, was nameless and only carried a number, is Nachum Enbar’s studio. With massive sculptures carved in stone and workstations for students who come to study with this master, Enbar’s studio offers a peek into an artist’s atelier from a different time and place. The knocking of the hammer and chisel can be heard from the street, and not once have passersby come inside, intrigued at the artist who is working there.

Vardit: You follow a work technique known as “direct carving”. What does that imply?

Nachum: The direct carving technique I practice had begun in the early 20th century. As part of an overall pursuit of new artistic paths and means of expression, there was this attempt to work not according to a preliminary model — from a plaster model for example, or with special tools for copying — but to carve into the stone directly. You work with the stone and evolve with it, taking into account the hardness of the slab, its dimensions and tones. You immerse yourself in it.

This type of work allows you to approach the stone differently, it’s not as violent. You’re not looking to implement right away the composition you’re after, rather you let yourself get to it. The work I do by hand, using no mechanical shortcuts, allows me the time need to grow and evolve with the slab. The formal aspect at the beginning of the work is crucial to me as a sculptor. Content tends to emerge later on, and the aim is to merge the two.

You’re works are rather easy to connect with.

Everywhere in the world, there’s a big disconnect between the greater audience and the leading voices in the art world, in Israel just as in Europe and the USA. In Israel however, being so small, there aren’t that many options. In the USA and in Europe there’s a niche for every single thing, there’s plenty of galleries that are active on all sorts of levels. There’s plenty of room, even for artists who aren’t in the mainstream at a given moment. But bigger places offer greater possibilities.

Is this not hard work, physically?

It is, but a lot depends on the pace of your life in general. If you stress out over schedules and running after material rewards, it might get difficult. I’ve accustomed myself to a more natural pace. For livelihood I only rely on teaching. I was always drawn to working by hand. In a way, stone carving is similar to working the land. It’s cathartic in that the product is creative and satisfying. The physical gratification over carving the stone is like that of plowing the land, of digging trenches in a virgin soil.

The series of sculptures on view is titled “The Sculptor and His Sculpture,” suggesting an inner-artistic introspection.

It’s a series I’ve been working on for some 10 years now. There’s my own portrait in it — a sculptor at work and how he relates to the sculpture itself. In the first work he is seen touching the sculpture, he observes it, slightly from behind, with a tilt of the head. Then he becomes absorbed in it, he embraces it to the point that it shows up as an abstract idea inside his head. When you’re at it, carving the stone, it’s also an idea that you’re sculpting, and yet part of what you’re saying is what you’re doing. The sculpture is also a povrtrayal of who you are. I portray myself through the idea in the sculpture.

You have quite a name as a teacher, and yet your works haven’t been as widely exhibited as I’d expect.

I haven’t had any major shows in recent years. I had two extensive shows in Israel in the 1970s, and one more in 2013. For a while I’ve been living and working in Milan, where I exhibited more frequently. But I haven’t been nurturing that. Partly because I was focused on life and work and partly because the art world in general went in a totally different direction, less related to the work I was doing. To an extent, work in that medium got excluded from the mainstream of the art world.

Located in the American Colony in Jaffa, Sophie Jungreis’s studio is
hard to miss. The yard is packed with massive, softly-shaped stone sculptures. A cross between human figures and forms reclining on the floor, they fill her beautiful, carefully-renovated home from corner to corner. Having painted her entire life, for the past 20 years she has been focusing on sculpture almost exclusively.

Vardit: The transition to sculpture, after so many years of painting, must have been very meaningful.

Sophie: I started noticing that everything I’m painting is turning three- dimensional. Being closely attuned to myself, to what’s going on inside me, I realized I needed to switch to sculpture. Which makes a lot of sense — after all, I had dealt a lot with restoration. I’m very involved with materials. It took a while for me to master the tools, and once I did I got obsessed with stone sculpting, which takes hours and hours. At first, it was very demanding, physically. But the urge to do it was much stronger. I don’t have the energy to tidy up at my place or to visit the galleries and sell myself, but when it comes to sculpting — that’s a different story.

Would you say that what you’re doing is feminine sculpture? Is there such a thing even?

Since there are women sculptors, there must be such a thing as feminine sculpting. Among the things that preoccupied me at the time when I began sculpting was the balance between anima and animus. I had returned from Canada, after more than 15 years away, and the aggressiveness around me really got to me. I felt the need to get to the bottom of it, to figure out what is going on here. I realized that the principle of male and female are not in balance. By feminine, I mean following your emotions and intuition; and by male, to go straight to it, to attain the goal.

You can sometimes tell the difference from the tools and the work process — Men tend to use heavier tools. My way of working is more like stroking. I remove layer after layer, never cutting straight into the stone.

Do you know in advance what the sculpture will look like?

No. I go for a stone that has a particular shape that speaks to me, and that’s where I start from. In a sense, the works are like an emotional biography. It is through the works that I understand where I am, at what emotional state. I see in the stone my inner drives. In a way, we all do that. I’m attracted to things that mirror me. The thing that matters to me is to be able to express, in stone, something from within, something that is not clear even to me.

This need comes from a deep feeling of angst. The process of liberating myself from that is there, in the works. If I had tried to accommodate myself to what the art world is after, that would be quite frustrating since I’ll never get to my own personal story. But I will get there if I’m left to my own devices, if I’m working on my sculptures. It’s also about the physical work it takes, the stone.

Uri Eliaz had once told me that the struggle I’m having with the stone is like a struggle to survive. And this I’m good at.

Uri Eliaz works in a studio on Eilat Street that spans two floors. The sound and exhaust of heavy traffic are left behind as you step into this realm, enchanted and teeming with creativity: hundreds of acrylics on canvas and wood, pastels drawn on black plastic, iron statues, small, endearing clay statuettes, as well as his wooden scarecrows, hundreds of them. At 88 he climbs with difficulty to the second floor, but still knows precisely where everything is in this studio, among the many colors, chalks and glues.

Vardit: We are showing 64 out of the hundreds of scarecrows you have here in this studio.

The scarecrows are a jumble of objects — broken-up furniture
parts, handles, carpentry details, metals, wires, and plastic. They were crafted not long ago — their lines expertly chiseled, etched into, polished, painted, but then discarded when no longer of use, thrown to the side of the road or piled up on the heap of trash that overpowers the sea off the port of Jaffa, to the south. There, delivered to the sun, rain, waves and sand, the guise of their former beauty

was lost. In some, dominant lines are still maintained, but others
are just fragments — bruised, tattered, roughened, consumed, thread-bare, of a natural shade that is that of wood, of rusting and stains — substances rich in energy. I have found much value in them, and richness — raw materials that lend themselves to an art both whimsical and made in earnest. Riddles are formed and solved, consequences give way to an edifice, to structures; to a pack of statues I’d like to call “idol-scarecrows,” by way of appropriation.

The house as well as the studio are packed with objects, books, artifacts.

Ever since early childhood I’ve been collecting things, sorting and compiling out of anything found lying on the floor, to me they were treasures. This inclination had led me to collect rocks, shards, coins, snakeskin, thorns, bird feathers, anything. I’ve reached the threshold of an uneducated archeology, geology, botany. Owing

to this tendency, later in life I came to collect the forsaken objects that are tossed away, discarded — this is where the scarecrows originate from.