ART Habens Contemporary Art Review | Page 199

Camille Danielle Wortman ART Habens craziness to create attention. I would like art to elevate us,to make me smile in complicity, to make me feel good to be part of the human race. As a contempory writer I love Helena ferrante . I live in a kibbutz, far away from the art scene and I haven’t got too much to say about contempory artists who seem to neglect the visual esthetics of art which is still very important in my eyes. I love working on large canvases, almost square, If I could afford it I would love to use 140x 140cm size canvasses the whole time. Why? I couldn’t tell, it is almost physical. I feel good in front of a square ! I know this is weird, and yet this is the way I feel. My husband, a fan of my work, always tells me that there is plenty to see there. Maybe I want the viewer to navigate in my paintings as I am navigating through life... I don’t know, as everything I do while I paint is not totally done consciously. I have seen some paintings of mine a few years after I had painted them, at the homes of people that had acquiered them and I looked at them like a stranger wandering how and why I painted them that way... Reading back some of my poems , I feel about it in the same way, and yet , yes my work is all linked to me, but who on earth is me! And yes, big canvasses need to be viewed from a distance, and maybe in a public space! Wow! As soon as something is transposed on a pad or a canvas it becomes an abstraction, obviously. I personnaly never paint outside, but I internalise the outside in me! All the landscapes I paint are made of my memories of Tunisia, of zikim, of the fall in Canada,but it is all imagined anew on my work , and without any conscious decision of mine. It just happens! Even when I start by wanting to make a painting out of a detail of a big canvas, pretty soon my painting takes a new direction independantly from me and from then on it has a life of its own.As a matter of fact many paintings 21 4 06 Special Issue