The only painting painted by the artist Mordechai Ardon by order was requested by his granddaughter Dalia.
As a young girl, she asked her grandfather for a birthday present - to draw her a "cheerful rain".
"We used to come to my grandparents' house in Jerusalem almost every weekend. We followed well-known Yakim customs - tea and cake and conversations that the adults would have, which as a little girl didn't interest me," she recalls.
"On one of these visits, out of boredom, I flipped through the catalogs of my grandfather's exhibitions. I looked at the pictures and saw a picture that really moved me. I didn't talk to anyone about this experience. A few months later, for my birthday, I asked if I could have a painting from my grandfather. I asked Let him draw me a 'cheerful rain,' and my grandfather smiled. He understood that I was asking for a painting similar to the shooter, the same painting that I saw a photo of in the catalog a few months before. He drew me an even more cheerful rain than the first one."
In her second book of poetry, "Suddenly, over the blue" (Editor: Dori Manor, Kibbutz Ha'Uchad Publishing House), which is now published, Dalia Ardon returned to the works of her grandfather and five other artists - Hanna Oren, Jan Donnelly, Mamie Ish-Shalom , Miriam Engelhardt and Michal Yakor - and writes poetry following their works.
A verbal creation following a plastic creation.
Dalia Ardon has lived in Boston for the past decade.
She grew up in Jerusalem and began writing poetry as a teenager in high school.
She studied law and worked as a lawyer in the legislation department of the Ministry of Justice.
After more than 20 years of legal work, she felt she had to "come back to herself", left the world of law and turned to graduate studies in comparative literature.
"It stemmed from the need to return to literature. I felt that I was missing something. The first book I published is a collection of poems I wrote over the years; the second, which is now being published, I wrote within a few months. The poems were written one after the other, very quickly."
The work "Yura", 1968, which Ardon dedicated to his granddaughter, and the song she wrote inspired by it, photo: Photo: Steve Gurina
Why did you choose the format of songs inspired by works?
"It wasn't planned. It started with me writing a song based on a sculpture my partner created. I was very happy with the result. Then I started writing a song and another song, I went from artist to artist - artists who I all know personally. These are people whose works are not only dear to my heart, but also They themselves are dear to my heart. I've never composed poetry or written lyrics to tunes, but it's a somewhat similar experience, because it's a kind of feeling that you connect to another person's work and you collaborate with them.
"Every song for a work I wrote, I showed to the artist who created it and is still alive. It was important for me to find out with the artist if the song I wrote connected with what they felt they expressed in their work. One of the artists, Jan Donnelly, does not speak Hebrew, so I wrote an English version of the songs for her paintings , for you to read and respond. She told me something exciting - that it's wonderful 'how the poems become paintings and the paintings become poems.'"
The loss of her life
The book opens with a sequence of works by Mordechai Ardon, one of the most recognized Israeli painters around the world.
His monumental stained glass, "The Vision of Isaiah", stands at the entrance to the National Library.
In one of Ardon's early paintings, he painted her grandmother, Miriam, sitting at a table and looking at the horizon.
What is it like to talk to grandparents through poetry, through art?
"It was very moving. I dreamed about this painting at night. I knew the facts about my grandmother, but until I looked at the picture in depth, I didn't understand it. I knew that grandmother was a writer, and that after she and grandfather and father escaped from the Nazis and came to Israel, she continued to write but she didn't managed to make Hebrew her writing language. This was, in my eyes, the miss of her life. I looked at the picture that Grandpa drew and noticed the details - I recognized her desk and noticed that she was hugging her papers. After her death I found stories, plays and poems that she wrote in her unnatural Hebrew ".
Dalia Ardon, photo: Lehi Ish Shalom
The grandmother wanted to pass the passion for writing on to her granddaughter.
"When I was about 9, my grandmother wanted to teach me to sew, and I said I wasn't interested. She looked at me critically and asked what I was interested in. I answered - to write. She always remembered that was my answer, and over the years she used to ask me - well, Are you still writing? It may be that she is happy that there is someone who continues her path."
The paintings and sculptures that inspired the book's poems and appear alongside them, were all created by Ardon's acquaintances.
One of them is her partner, the sculptor Memi Ish-Shalom.
Another sculptor, Hana Oren, was a friend of the poet's parents.
Ardon came to Oren's work only after her death.
"I was not aware in Hana Oren's life that she had become a sculptor. I discovered it only after her death and I was amazed by her sculptures. In fact, almost all the creators in the book are artists who came to art quite late in their lives. The contemporary creators are not young in age, but they are young in relation to their art, And it's been developing before my eyes in recent years."
The fiction of the brush
In another poem, Ardon observes an untitled painting of a girl figure in green, painted by her grandfather, and the poem she wrote was born from a gut feeling regarding the biographical origins of the piece.
"I called the song 'The Eyes' because of the chilling look of the figure in the painting. I have a feeling that my grandfather painted the painting following one of his nightmares about the Holocaust. His parents and most of his brothers, and his young nieces and nephews, were murdered by the Nazis. Like many who were lucky enough to escape from Europe before the Holocaust and my sons Their family was murdered there - it hit him. But my interpretation of the painting is not based on facts that link the painting to the Holocaust. It's just intuition."
Mordechai Ardon, 1977, photo: Stanley I. Batkin, Israel Museum
The name of the book, "Suddenly, above the blue" is taken from a poem that Ardon wrote following a piece by her grandfather called "In Blue".
"A thought / was ignited --- // suddenly, out of the blue,/ fluttering/ inspiration," the poet writes in the poem that opens the book.
This is a special painting for her because she watched his creation process.
"I was a child, and I remember the excitement. Not every painting by my grandfather aroused excitement in me, but this was a painting that really struck me. Even then, as a child, I thought it expressed thought and inspiration, and years later, when I looked at it again, I felt that it expressed the experience Mine, of writing poetry.
"The poems I wrote in this book are a kind of connection between what the work 'said to me' and my personal experience. It is a combination of my interpretation of my emotional experience, which combines with what I understand from the work, and from this combination, a new and shared work is created."
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