“The line has the power to emulate truthfulness that obeys the laws of nature,” says Yehudit Englard. For her abstraction is motion, like the forces of nature which are in perpetual motion, as are the clouds, the waves and the wind. Her works endeavor to touch as well as to reveal both life and nature. Her creativity process takes off from a place where nothing can be seen before the painting, impressively and by degrees, evolves into its finished shape. “I’ll see I won’t see, it will come to me later, perhaps, almost at the end,” she adds describing the force that drives her creativity: “To feel, to touch, to imagine, to reveal the recesses of the mind and the spirit of woman with her truth, her ideas, her insights, her experience, her senses, her investigation, her trial and error – from all these places I have grown.”

The titles of Englard’s abstract works speak for themselves: “Hope, Gesture, Integration, Balance, Hear O Israel, Blessing, Sadness, All Ways, Prayer, After the Storm, In Recognition, Including, Manifesto, Uncertainty, Going Into, In Deep Waters, Devotion, Two Thoughts, Loneliness, Sunrise, Protest for Balance.”  The title of each work embodies the emotion that the artist is undergoing while creating her work.

The work Pain, which deals with bereavement, portrays a large dominant red area gushing out from a dark threatening sky and stretching down, in drips of paint, towards a small bright base from which bursts forth a white color with a blue stripe overlying it, an auspicious omen of optimism. Thus does the artist describe the course of her creativity: “Diverse levels of pain and emotion are expressed when I am engaged in the creation of the painting. It all gushes out rapidly, black up above and all the remainder red flowing blood. From below a small strip of water-like blue bursts forth in a desire to discover, despite all the obstacles, the ray of light displayed in the flowing water.”

In a large sized work bearing the title Integration, which also appears on the cover of the catalogue, an orange-red patch fills most of the area of the canvas and radiates a life-giving energy like the blood coursing through our body. Beside it appears a patch of darkness in a deep Prussian blue, reminiscent of the fact that in reality significant events emanate from a place of hardship. A sheltering azure sky above provides a refuge for broad white strips simulating buildings, and towards the bottom of the work creeps an expanse of earth and sand. The title is aimed as a protest against the cancellation of integration in the schools and against the authorities who have failed to learn that success cannot be achieved immediately and who have hastily annulled a positive project that could have somewhat strengthened the weaker strata of society.

Englard recounts that she draws her energy from up above and therefore in most of her works she paints the sky. She speaks about her custom of contemplating the clouds in the hope of encompassing in her works the energy of the universe, the connection with nature stemming from a place of unity and growth, like the tree of life. In the painting Reminiscences 3 the sky and the earth are almost white, and in the middle a dark almost black patch appears denoting loss; displayed beside it is a bright warm yellow patch of hope manifesting the need to move on forwards regardless of the ever-present hardships and uncertainties. A similar ambience is also expressed in the work titled In Black

The title of the painting A Piece of Sky has been taken from the caption in one of Leah Goldberg’s poems. This painting originated from a small line that the artist wanted to draw on the Earth. The painting is mostly in black except for its lighter colored lower part; on the left side a man is seen climbing up a ladder, determined to reach and touch a piece of sky. The painting Changing Reality was created in a similar state of mind. Its dark left side symbolizes reality whereas on its right side, which is lighter in color, the artist has changed and reinvented reality. In this manner she has brought light into darkness and hardship. The painting Loneliness expresses the existential condition of the artist.

The governing intuitivism of Yehudit Englard’s paintings generates the sensation that the intensiveness has sown confusion in her life where she undergoes the gamut of subconscious emotions and experiences. Despite the great depth of their expressiveness, her paintings are endowed with an abundance of intimacy and portray a wide range of human experiences. The artist takes upon herself the obligation to locate these emotions and to express them in her artwork. When the storehouse of vicissitudes of the human condition bursts onto the canvas everything seems to occur there simultaneously, and the separation between past, present, and future becomes totally insignificant. The present, which was supposed to be dominant at the time, surrenders on occasion to the mighty forces of the past, while the future appears in the space of the painting like an unknown world portending hope.

Yehudit Englard, an abstract colorist artist, began her artistic career creating free almost abstract paintings and over the years they have become wholly abstract. The works are executed in oils on large sized canvases, in breathtaking colors expressing the personal language that the artist has developed over the years, a colorist language with a distinctive feature and an impressive presence. In this totally abstract and well constructed language, the paintings comprise layers of paint and brushstrokes which form the composition.

These paintings are the musical partitura of the artist who invites the viewer to move to and fro over the surface of the work in accordance with the harmonies of families of color placed alongside disharmonies of colorful contrasts. The surface of the painting is the stage on which the patches of color and the brushstrokes amuse themselves with games of direction, thickness, and layer. The patches of color and lines that wrestle, pulling and pushing, on this stage demonstrate their joint ability to accept or reject harmonious or disharmonious relationships, dynamic hierarchies, and diverse power strategies.