I was born in Israel and came to New York City in 1973. Four years later I began my study of Aesthetic Realism, the education founded by the American philosopher and poet Eli Siegel. This was the greatest thing that happened to me—it has made my life rich with happiness and meaning. Learning from Aesthetic Realism that there is a fight in me and in everyone that affects every aspect of our lives: between the desire to like the world; respect what’s different from ourselves, and the desire to have contempt, to “lessen…what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it,” freed me to express myself in ways I didn't know were possible. Two fields of expression that mean very much to me are my work as a sculptor and as an essayist.

Through what I’ve been learning these years, I have a passionate conviction about what will make for peace in my homeland and the necessity for people and nations to learn from art how to see—something Aesthetic Realism explains for the first time. My articles have been published in newspapers throughout the United States. I am also a contributor to the book Aesthetic Realism and the Answer to Racism (Orange Angle Press, 2004).

My education continues in classes taught by Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism Chairman of Education. In addition, I have been studying in "The Art of Drawing: Surface & Depth" for over 35 years. This class was first taught by the eminent printmaker, the late Chaim Koppelman, and is now taught by painter, Marcia Rackow. I also attend the “Critical Inquiry: A Workshop in the Visual Arts” taught by painter, Dorothy Koppelman. These classes and others in the rich curriculum of courses offered at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, have as their basis the landmark principle stated by Eli Siegel: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Learning about the relation of art and life as explained in this principle has enabled me to know myself better and my work as a sculptor has deepened. I also understand more why, as a young girl on the Kibbutz, I was swept and felt composed by the beauty and mystery of African art and the passionate sculpture of Rodin. I love sculpture and feel so expressed working with clay in particular. The opposites of heaviness and lightness, hardness and softness, matter and space are made one in this medium. In my life, I have, as others have, shuttled back and forth between being severe and then being sympathetic in a way that confused me and made me ashamed. But in every good piece of sculpture hardness and softness, are beautifully, sensibly related! As I create a bust of a woman and see for instance how malleable clay hardens it thrills and inspires me. I feel surer that I can be both firm and yielding for one good purpose.

I love these sentences from Eli Siegel’s lecture, “Aesthetic Realism and Beauty: Sculpture” which describe what the sculptor experiences and goes after:

“There is a feeling of resisting nature opposed by insistent man, and man saying to insistent, waiting nature, ‘I can find form in you, and I’ll get that form out of you though you resist, though you’re marble, though you’re bronze, though you’re diorite, though you’re granite, and now though you’re steel—though you’re anything, I’ll get beauty out of you. I don’t care how you come, I don’t care what aspect of the mineral kingdom you may show yourself as, I’ll show you I can get beauty out of you."