Slow and Steady

It's not like I don't have an infinity of things to say about the currrent goings on in Israel, how I'm coping and so forth. But instead, I'll report just the incremental progress on the face-work: the results of my experiments these last weeks and months. I am trying to squeeze more control and expressive range out of this technology, which is still too unwieldy. --S.

"Pilgrim". An earlier state of this sculpture is up on my Flickr site.

"Notta Naughtsy"

"Bluette"

"Yehuda"

Desert Interlude

 

Camel-head study, by Saadya, 2011. 

Yesterday I was able to get to my desert spot in the Negev, the first time since hostilities broke out 7 weeks ago that I've ventured into nature's open, empty spaces. It's the nearest place by public transportation where I can feel free: a half-hour busride on the highway south of Beersheva, then a 12 minute walk into the desert as the traffic sights and sounds disappear. Always I rest my head on the root of this Eshel tree (Tamarix aphylla) knowing it and the desert

will work its charm and in fifteen minutes I'll be calmed from agitation, anxiety -- about employment, about my ailing parents, about Covid, about the government of criminals in Israel since January, now about this war, and the hostages one of whom I know (the actor Luis Har, born in Argentina, who I shared a stage with once). All these melt away, or can be thought of  from the right distance and closeness, from the right spans of time. Then I can walk farther into the glimmering rocks, and note the vestiges of past inhabitants, some from centuries ago, some from tens of thousands of years ago. No doubt they had struggles too, families, tribes, neighbors, survival, but that's all gone now, as I will be too for some future spectator. It is as well.   

 --S.

 Look closely, you'll see stone ridges built by residents, some here a VERY long time ago.

Cutting-edge technologies: Flint tools and projectiles from around the Negev, some made 40,000 years ago. The one at far right is from this landscape (it cuts steak very nicely, I can attest). At left is a modern counterpart, a fragment of an Iron Dome arrowhead that fell on a street near me.

Negev Camels, by Saadya, 2005. 

ּ***Update:   On Feb 12, my acquaintance Luis Har and another hostage were miraculously freed, in a heroic IDF commando operation. 134 others are still in captivity, if they are alive. But it makes a difference, when its one who you know.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13245479/Israeli-hostage-describes-hell-Gaza.html

 

Agitation and Calm; Activity or is it Escapism

 

Head by Saadya, Oct 2023.
Folded from an uncut rectangle of watercolor paper.

[November 4, 2023.]  I’m processing lots. Like all my compatriots and I guess all of the Middle East. It's fair to ask, when I make time for origami, what I'm making time for, and what’s being set aside. Calm, is part of what the folding brings. It quells agitation and gives a kind of time-out, after which one is mentally refreshed. 

But there are positive activities that any citizen can and should get involved with these days. At Soroka hospital up the street are wounded soldiers and civilians; they have families staying with them in need of feeding, lodging, entertainment which could include origami, of children especially but not only. There are the fields west of here: much of the fresh produce in this country comes from areas near to Gaza, empty now of hands for the fall harvest and winter seeding. But I’m too old for a full day’s agricultural labor, and limit myself to neighborhood-garden plantings for the food crunch that will come in 3 months. Also I have aging parents in a bad way and obligations to care for them; I can’t just hand myself over to national causes. In the Dead Sea Hotel area which is close to me (mentally close for residents of the Negev; geographically not really closer than the big cities of Israel's “center”) are lodged residents displaced from the Gaza envelope towns and farms, tens of thousands of them; I’ve made arrangements to volunteer and should start with that soon. That may or may not involve origami: could be accompanying groups of bicyclists, could be teaching English, or other involvements, we’ll see. I'm socializing more in this period, both with my eco-activist urban-farm group (Beersheva’s Khavat Be’eri, what a team of Quiet Doers, real heroes!) which has stayed open and filled the gap left by the shuttered educational institutions, and with the art-activist group Homa that has also spearheaded activities.

In short I can’t say I’ve been doing much in the wartime contributions department beyond worry, like most of the civilian population.

When I say ‘do origami’ and ‘where does it fit in all this’ what do I mean. Well I have this endless, lifelong research project (i.e., obsession) to get cleaner and cleaner renditions of the human face, the human head; so I have piles of studies done at cafes on cheap paper (about 20 minutes apiece), the best of which are tested now at home on good paper (2-3 hours apiece, including the cutting & staining). I’m committed also to going back to some of my 

printer paper experiments

best animal model designs, even from 30 years ago, and finding the optimal size and colorations to make them with, again from the good paper (2-5 hours each). ‘Good paper’ means for me Arches 300g pure cotton watercolor paper with a mild grain: last week I finally bought a roll of this stuff at Uri’s Art Supplies (Uri stayed open, yay!!) 130 cm by 970 cm, so paper size is no longer a limitation. The material is so luxurious to handle, and as it dries transitions through stages with distinct folding properties and a wonderful solidity to the end-product. The plan is to get ready for a museum exhibition; details on that when things firm up. 

And finally there’s this scattershot origami teaching now, I go wherever the volunteers who are arranging these things assign me in the neighborhoods. I got an unexpected burst of joy on Thursday from teaching very tiny people—only two of the bunch had made it to seven years old… Hamas did me the honor of welcoming me just when I arrived at 4PM with some rockets to the skies right above—a pretty sight in the late afternoon. (Taken out by Iron Dome; sorry, didn’t think to snap a photograph). The little ones with their mothers all trooped out of the bomb shelter and were folding away calmly with me minutes later. Gotta love ’em.

 success with butterflies by Sanja S. Cucek

Folding Under Fire

 

It’s wartime here, like it or not; has been war in Ukraine & Russia almost two years now, will be in the China theater soon enough, and is coming soon maybe to a theater near you. I’ve decided to revive my Origami Blog.

Here’s a Horse I made on Saturday. My best yet. From a model first designed in 1993: so thirty years ago (have probably made a hundred), a design that’s since undergone three permutations, including the one this week.

Origami for me is: well there’s too much to say, but it’s carried me through some hard times, went with me into the hospital in 2022 for treatments to stage 2/3 cancer —mantle cell lymphoma — and out of that, for now. In this war it’s acquiring a strange intensity. I’m dusting off old models and designs: these ones are for soldiers, whiling away hours on the front; those ones are for me, to shed my emotions into as sculptures & go into museums later, maybe, if this house-and-studio doesn’t turn into rubble.

It gives a calm; isn’t a screen to watch, or the scream of a jet, wail of a siren, boom of a missile hitting concrete; is something to return to after these & figure out: a puzzle with lots of solutions, but few good ones. It teaches efficiency, economy, humility really, since it is just a piece of paper for just this moment, no one is going to value it if you don’t. Like your life.

I had this idea decades ago, when starting this Blog, that people can no longer hear each other, that words have stopped being effective, and images, videos, chattering heads, we already have too much of; our plastic arts in the galleries aren’t cutting it anymore for communication, unification, or for sparking us into action.

But origami — face it, doesn’t it electrify, when it’s good? Doesn’t it get the pulse of my blood into the paper, and from there into yours? Follow it along with your eye’s own fingers, and the heart that’s in them, and the mind too of course. The geometry and the passion. Take them in, just from the sight of a model, or if you’ve learned some paperfolding, make one of these for yourself.

Let’s see if we can’t thrill you.

Saadya Sternberg

Beersheva, Israel

Origami Horse, by Saadya, 2023.
 30 cm tall; stained & wetfolded from
 an uncut 91 cm square of Arches
cotton-rag watercolor paper.