HaRav Avraham Yitzchak Kook

HaRav Avraham Yitzchak Kook, first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Eretz Yisrael, meets the viewer straight on. The tall rabbinic hat is laid in with heavy sweeps of dark blue, the knife dragging the paint into deep ridges. The face beneath is built from cool greens and pale blues, the forehead scored with upright marks, the eyes level and dark, set with small flecks of red. The beard descends in long ribbons of white, blue, and green, threaded with crimson, carrying the full weight of the impasto.

Around the head the ground breaks open. Short bars of yellow, rose, magenta, and white radiate outward in every direction, so that the light appears to leave the figure rather than fall upon it. It is a fitting grammar for the poet and mystic of the generation of return, who taught that the old would be made new and the new made holy. Painted with the knife alone in the artist’s Johannesburg studio, the work now lives in a private collection.