We were lucky to catch up with Batnadiv HaKarmi recently and have shared our conversation below.
Batnadiv, appreciate you joining us today. Can you tell us about an important lesson you learned in school and why that lesson is important to you?
I studied painting in a very rigorous Atelier-style school, where we drew and painted from observation from morning till night. In the summer, we travelled to Washington DC to copy old master paintings at the National Gallery. The goal was an elusive perfection, represented by becoming a kind of objective eye. The eradication of the personal. It was both soul destroying and addictive: this idea that if only you looked hard enough, you could do it right. That it was all about escaping the self. Several years after leaving this Atelier, I joined a copyist program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The instructor, Ben Tritt, asked me which artwork I would like to copy, and why. I said that I was leaning towards Vermeer, because I was drawn to his perfection. That I was naturally such a messy painter, and I wanted to achieve control.
Ben looked me in the eye: “You’re thinking about this all wrong,” he said. “If you’re a messy painter, you don’t try to become a controlled painter. You become the best messy painter you can be.” He then assigned me to copy Titian.
I copied Titian—which was a transformative experience in and of itself. But that brief exchange was life changing. The sudden understanding that there is a certain kind of artist that you are meant to be—by temperament, by history, by the very way your body moves. And you have to follow that. That art requires self-knowledge, and even harder–self-acceptance. And that there is not one art, even for those of us driven by the love of craft. There are multiple traditions. Dialogues you can open. Conversations waiting to be had. Finding your voice is often a matter of finding the artists and writers with whom you can speak.
Batnadiv, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I am a visual artist and writer, whose work moves between the polarities of the mythic and the domestic, looking at the tensions and the cross fertilization between them. I write about the mundane struggles of motherhood, and about the biblical Rachel’s desire to be a mother; paint the consecutive weeks of pregnancy in corporeal detail, while echoing the traditions of idealized Sumerian fertility goddesses. When exploring myth, I search for the underlying hum of human experience that gives these archetypes their power. And concurrently, I take the chaotic splatter of my own life– the caretaking, the cleaning, and day to day drudgery that makes up so much of parenting– and try to find its deeper meaning by placing it within the structure of overarching stories. My work is highly intertextual, imbued with the awareness of speaking from within and to a tradition—whether as call, as question, as reposte, or as harmony. My paintings are in dialogue with art history, my poetry often dense with allusions. While they can be read on the surface level, much of the meaning takes place in the web of interactions with other art pieces.
This mode of creating probably draws on my upbringing as the scion of a rabbinic ultra-Orthodox family. I grew up along with my nine siblings in the Old City of Jerusalem, praying in a synagogue placed above the room where my ancestor, the Arizal, had been born 1500 years before. I went to bed to stories of David and Saul. We spent the summers with my Holocaust survivor grandparents, who floated upon the surface of America while living in the past, communing with ghosts. I experienced myself as literally housed in history, the world roiled by hidden forces beneath and around it, my lived experience but the small visible tip of a huge iceberg.
I explored mythology in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I earned an MA in Comparative Literature, with an emphasis on Classics. My academic studies helped catalyze one of my most sustained and ambitious projects: Bibliodraw (https://bibliodraw.blogspot.
Growing up in a deeply religious home, there was an attitude of awe to the written word. The world was storied through biblical and mythological archetypes. This awe drew me to writing and reading, yet also made it very hard to speak my own words. The poetry in Bibliodraw is rudimentary—thoughts and impressions catalyzed through the act of reading and drawing. But it enabled me to speak back to the text, claiming my own voice. Part of Bibliodraw was later exhibited in the Senate Gallery, Ben Gurion University as well as in the Mishkan Museum of Art in Ein Harod. I have also taught workshops based on this approach in multiple institutions and was moved by how the interaction with the Biblical text catalyzed intimate and unexpected works, each participant bringing a completely different experience.
I have long been working on a series of poems that explores my family history. Part of this series formed the core of my chapbook The Love of Mortal Beings, which tells the story of my Holocaust-survivor grandparents through the prism of the Bible. The Love of Mortal Beings was a runner up for Harbor Review’s Jewish Women’s poetry prize, and was published this year by Kelsay Books. My more recent poems have been looking at my own experience of motherhood, and the impact of intergenerational trauma.
In additional to family history, I also look at the history of place. My ongoing collaborative art project, The Voices in the Walls (https://julia1238.wixsite.
My work is sparked by the juxtaposition of the immediacy of the present with the hidden presence of the past, and the sense of how the two together impact the future.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
Cliché as it sounds, I think being an artist allows you to live life more fully. When I am writing or painting, I engage with the world in an intense way. The light becomes almost hallucinatory. Detail swim to the surface, saturated with meaning. Every sketch is an exercise in mindfulness, a moment of profound presence. The practice of poetry is the practice of a life observed, Art (literary and visual) has also formed the foundation of some of my deepest friendships. I frequently engage in art “havrutas” (a traditional Hebrew term for a study fellowship), in years-long dialogue and collaboration with fellow artists. After giving birth to my third baby, I made it through the sleepless nights by typing up snatches of lines into a shared Google doc with a fellow mother-poet, who had given birth a few weeks before me. Every day, we sent each other a prompt, a poem, feedback. Our experiences reflected and refracted upon each other. Sharing creativity is one of the most intimate ways of knowing another person. And it makes me realize how every act of reading and viewing art contains traces of this intimacy.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
I do not think there are “non-creatives.” I think all human beings are creative. The question is where and how that creativity is channeled and expressed. Perhaps the key difference between being creative and being “a creative” is the issue of permission. Coming from a very traditional ultra-Orthodox Jewish upbringing, it was a real struggle to give myself permission to have personal aspirations. To claim, as a woman, my own voice and dreams, rather than acting in the background according to the traditional dictum that
“all of the honor of a princess is within” (Psalms 45: 14).
This might seem far from the typical experience in the age of social media, where every person is one click away from sharing their creativity with an unlimited audience who can respond in an instant. But I think it highlights something universal: it is very difficult to grant ourselves the permission to take our work seriously. To listen to what it wants to say, and to follow it.
Creativity requires the suspension of judgment for a while. You need to observe what you have made, without thinking about how other people will respond. Then you need the permission to follow it.
We live in a society that expects instant response, that values efficiency and productivity. Yet that instant feedback, which seems so freeing, can be a terrible constraint. Creativity requires time. Meandering. Inefficiency as we try one thing then another. There are brooding periods that seem fallow, but which eventually allow the works to grow. I think it is often difficult to give ourselves the permission to take this time. And to take the work seriously enough to let it speak to us, without the cacophony of other voices.
When teaching, I always begin feedback sessions by noting three elements about the work. It is only at a later stage that we begin to raise possibilities of where this work could go.
Creativity is a path, not a product. And we need permission to follow this path.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @batnadiv.art
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Batnadiv
Image Credits
Netanael Cohen Raviv Finer Havi Bezaleli