In the Eye of the Beholder - Illustrations to Order

Every second Monday night, another issue of the bimonthly news magazine, The Jerusalem Report, goes to press, containing at least a dozen of my paintings. The articles I am to illustrate begin to arrive by fax and e-mail at the end of the previous week, but there are inevitably writers who wait for the last minute to relate to the latest developments in our highly volatile part of the world. Deadline day can require as many as four or five illustrations.

This pictorial frenzy requires fast thinking and execution, but it would be entirely impossible if not for the use of modern digital technology. I use a combination of traditional drawings together with computer techniques. Usually an illustration begins life as a pencil or pen-and-ink drawing on paper, which is then scanned into the computer. I might also choose to do the drawing piecemeal as separate elements, and then, once scanned, the various elements can be manipulated and combined until they fit together - whereas in "real" drawing, I would have to begin afresh or erase and redraw to move the pieces around.

Once the drawing is in the computer, I can then refine it and add colour with the help of two graphic programmes, Photoshop and Painter, and the Wacom stylus, a pen-shaped device that replaces the mouse, enabling me to paint and draw directly on the computer.

The computer is especially convenient for mixing different techniques and elements. It is simple to take pieces of photographs, stretch and cut them to fit, and combine them with the drawing, whether as a collage or a seamless trompe-l'oeil. The Internet provides an endless repository of photographs and paintings of all kinds and subjects to be used and abused at will. I can also use graphic software to create complex geometric forms, or a three-dimensional programme to create photo-realistic imaginary objects.

And, of course, the computer and Internet also make it possible to transfer my artwork over to the waiting magazine staff in a fraction of a second; and even revise and resend it if there is a last-minute need for a change.

Many of the articles relate to politics and conflict, but there are also book reviews and articles on business and technology, culture, society and religion. Each kind of drawing presents its own particular joys and difficulties. I am not a political cartoonist, but rather, an editorial illustrator. This means I must create a painting that accompanies and clarifies the writer's position, whether or not I personally happen to agree with it. And since The Jerusalem Report is careful to publish conflicting viewpoints on virtually every controversial issue, I must perforce illustrate articles with which I sometimes passionately disagree.

But my task remains the same: to find a visual image which expresses the subject and highlights the point of the article, and draw it in a way which suits its atmosphere. Sometimes I can be frivolous and mocking, using a caricature-like style and visual jokes. Sometimes the matter in hand is too serious for jocularity and I prefer a realistic rendering of metaphor, as in the Rabin memorial candles or the slain pawns illustrating this article.

In Middle Eastern politics, some characters change, new situations occur; but there are also people and problems that recur year after year. I have portrayed Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestinian Authority, dozens of times over the years and each time I use a different guise, depending on what the writer has to say about him. When a writer mocked the hopeless Palestinian attempt to defeat Israel with homemade rockets, I depicted him as the hapless coyote of the Road-Runner cartoons (not forgetting to credit the recently deceased Chuck Jones). In a more concerned attempt to understand Arafat's mental state I chose to illustrate it with a photomontage, where I inserted Arafat's face for that of the deranged King Saul (with due credit to Rembrandt).

In an article discussing the competition in the Likud Party to replace Netanyahu, I showed Sharon, Olmert and Sheetrit as three baseball pitchers warming up in the bullpen. For the next issue, I received an article on exactly the same subject! This time, I showed the three candidates as the three goddesses of the Judgment of Paris, with Sharon as the overweight Queen Hera, Olmert as a cigar-puffing Aphrodite and Shitreet as a demure Athena. I dressed this up with a little computer sleight-of-hand as a Grecian pottery shard. I never know how much of my audience is able to identify the literary references, but it does give me some innocent fun!

When it comes to book reviews I have a much freer hand. I rarely get a chance to read the book itself, but must form an impression from the review. The book pages are my chance to be "artistic," often using the face of the writer playing the part of his character, while creating a painting that seems to me to fit the atmosphere of the book under discussion. Economics and technology pieces on the other hand are almost always jokes - attempts to add a touch of levity to what tend to be rather dry pages.

Here is a selection of my illustrations which have appeared in The Jerusalem Report over the past few years and which were exhibited in the Jerusalem Theatre last year, together with some background on the articles which prompted them, and the technical methods used in their creation.

		BILLIARD COEXISTENCE
		This piece illustrated a story of a casual game of pool played with locals in a hotel in Ramallah while waiting for an interviewee - a scene which seemed to me to exemplify the peace that was already a reality. I wanted to stress the symbolism, rather than depicting the scene. Ironically, this appeared only a few

MOTHER AND SOLDIER
This accompanied a book review for a novel dealing with the conflicts of a Palestinian mother whose child dies at a roadblock, and an Israeli officer who blames himself. The reader will recognize references both to Picasso's Guernica and to the less well-known Massacre in Korea. It began as a pen and ink drawing, scanned and then coloured in Photoshop.

		OUTSTANDING MUSICIANS UNIT
		This piece was close to home - my two older sons both served in the Outstanding Musicians Unit described in the article, and played chamber music through their entire army service.

SOLDIER VS. YESHIVA  STUDENT
This time I decided to draw the situation literally; the author described his feelings as his son went off to the army, and his religious neighbour's son stayed studying in his yeshiva.

		LUBAVITCH HASIDIM
		The article told of a group of Lubavitch Hasidim who moved in on a small western town in the USA. I told the story almost literally, with just a bit of overstatement for fun - of course they didn't really come in a covered wagon. As far as I know.

KING DAVID
King David as a begging street musician illustrates the budgetary straits of culture in Israel. It is an ink drawing, scanned and painted in Photoshop and Painter. I used a Wacom tablet and stylus to draw and paint in the computer.

		ANOREXIA
		This illustration is a pencil drawing developed in Photoshop and Painter. The starving girl at the Sabbath feast was a cover illustration for a piece on the problem of anorexia among Israel's Orthodox community.

POPULATION DENSITY
In this piece on the problem of the density of Israel's population, the sardine tin was created in Hash Animaster, with the Srulik-style Israelis painted on with the Wacom (after the character created by the well-known Israeli caricaturist, Dosh).

		PAWNS ARE ALWAYS  THE FIRST SACRIFICED
		Again, the hyper-realism of 3-D rendering lends a certain stark solidity to a simple metaphor which I wanted to be dead serious, without an element of caricature. This was made after the first month of violence in Autumn of 2000, in which so many

JEWISH IDENTITY
For an article on the complexity of the search for Jewish identity in Israel, I created this flag-shaped maze. The intricate shape was created in CorelDraw, with perspective distortion and extrusion, then treated in Photoshop with a filter; figures and shadows were painted in Photoshop.

		THE BIG M
		The writer was shocked by the golden arches erected atop a shopping mall. I built on the similarity of the logo to the Tablets of the Law, and stood Ronald Macdonald in the traditional pose we all know from Doré's Moses. Here the computer painting entirely buries the original scanned pencil drawing, with a Painter surface relief filter to create an impasto effect.

MOURNING
The incredibly difficult task of illustrating an article of mourning for Rabin. These candles were created in Hash Animaster with a Photoshop filter.