With intention and sincerity, Shir Zalcman’s artwork is a piece of herself. The thirty-six year old Israeli artist paints to reflect the present moment of her everyday, emotional experience. Mainly using acrylic paint and charcoal mediums, she uses palette knives and brushes to create depth through texture, layering and linework. Choosing a bold colour palette, she intuitively composes these textural patterns by layering them together to explore the visceral nature of feelings. She works in harmony with the fast drying process of acrylic paint, building layers to be completed as a whole rather than in parts. Her paintings have been shown at a variety of exhibitions. In 2021 she won the Merit Award at the Art room gallery’s ABSTRACT exhibit. Her most recent showing was at Depths and Layers, a solo exhibition at Tel Aviv. Zalcman has been published in two issues with APERO MAGAZINE. Her work has also been shown in ITZUV, Israel’s top magazine for house decor.
Zalcman takes a bold approach in her paintings by allowing her feelings to take over the process. This freedom gives her work spontaneity and purity in its expression. Using vivid colours in complementary spectrums like blue and reds, she expresses a deep intensity. The stark contrast between her colour tones enables more room for depth and perspective between form, light and darkness. Her brushwork builds layers of fractal textures in angular shapes, creating intricate, irregular patterns reminiscent of imagery in nature. These abstract impressions evoke the emotional complexity within herself. She sometimes marks her paintings with charcoal to emphasize these shifting perspectives. The lines evoke a delicate composition of being between two dimensional and three dimensional states. Zalcman knows she is finished with a painting when she feels moved by the dialogue between colors; creating a complex relationship between visualization and emotional sensation. She aims to provoke these feelings deep within a person that words are limited to describe. Her work captures this essence, creating a multitude of possibilities to be felt through the subjective experience of the viewer. Flowing through the movements of perception, an emotional landscape rises within her in the midst of a visual vision.