“Fire and Snow”, Artists’ House, Tel Aviv, Curator: Ron Bartos. (Photo credit: Lena Gomon)

---

This is the first one woman show of the Jerusalem-based Israeli-Canadian painter Linda Adams Adams’ paintings, including those featured in this exhibition, often oscillate between disparate artistic values. In them, we find paintings of fire and paintings of snow, paintings of light and darkness, paintings whose language adheres to reality and to the tradition of painting alongside ones that turn to the imagination or vision and adopt an ethereal language.

And perhaps we would do well to abandon the dichotomic descriptions and the differentiation into two distinct poles and approach Adams’ work as a cyclic action, a whirlpool at the heart of the painting. The whirlpool is fitting of Adams’ practice, since she operates by the power of the stream – the stream of consciousness, the stream of creativity, the stream of painting. The horizontal current is the painter’s

answer to the vertical format of systematic, structured, and traditional practice, or to stylistic and thematic uniformity.

But the stream power is not the only fount from which her art flows; it is also engendered by the whirlpool: the disturbance in the continuous flow, or rather, the whirlpool in the flow of the painting, can be used as the key for viewing Adams’ paintings.

In the Book of Judges, after the Ephraimites threatened Jephthah the Gileadite, the Gileadites gathered to fight back, killing them and chasing the surviving men to the other bank of the Jordan River. It was known that unlike the other tribes of Israel, the Ephraimites pronounced the Hebrew word “shibboleth” as “sibboleth”. The Gileadites used this to their advantage, asking any suspected survivor to say the word “shibboleth”. Those who sounded it as “sibboleth” were identified as Ephraimite and killed. In the Ancient language of the Gileadeans and Ephraimites, the meaning of the word “shibboleth” (or “sibboleth”) was “whirlpool”. The whirlpool is a temporary camp on the river bank; an interruption of the stream; a shift (break) in the dialect; or in Adams’ context – a personal artistic accent that allows her

painting the freedom to flow through her diverse vernaculars, the stream and the whirlpool.

The exhibition features paintings Linda Adams created over the last couple of years, and if while viewing them we wish to outline their order, we could say that over time, the painter moved away from traditional painting towards more “abridged” painting: Her recent paintings are characterized by their leanness, minimalist palette, and haziness of the depicted objects. This painterly “diet” can be traced to

the painter’s desire to capture a temperature, mood, and symbols from the observation of nature and people. But then again, this is merely a description of the general stream, in which we also find whirlpools, oscillations, and linguistic shifts. And we can add another observation: The fire paintings are thicker, more narrative and depict people and animals, while the snow paintings are leaner, more abstract, and offer a panoramic landscape view. While this is yet another dichotomic pairing, it is brought here not as two opposing banks of the same river but as two opposing forces that join to create one world, as in Rabbi Johanan’s answer to the question “How did the Holy One, blessed be He, create His world?” in Rabba Genesis 10: “The Lord took two balls, one of fire and the other of snow, and worked them into each other, and from these the world was created.”

Ron Bartos