By Joel Leyden and Orit Lotringer
Israel News Agency

Ra'anana --- October 10, 2008 ....... The art of Evan Bellin, which fascinates and captures the observer with its powerful colors and forms, goes on display at the Ra'anana Park Art Gallery in Ra'anana, Israel today.

Bellin work puts upfront a pre-occupation with the human and especially the female image, creating a synthesis between the classical Renaissance tradition and the Expressionist style that developed in Twentieth Century art.

Evan’s paintings, drawn in both Israel and the US, come to express a kind of internal reality of unconscious combinations. They do not translate reality, although they lean on it enough so as to reveal to us a world created by the artist himself in his individualistic and subjective style.

The name of the Ra'anana, Israel exhibit, “Parapraxis,” is taken from the psychoanalytic dictionary and emphasizes a kind of slip of the tongue, something said, written, or even painted without prior intention, slipped out by surprise, as if by mistake. Psychoanalysis in its search after pure truth, attributes great meaning to these “slips.” And in Evan’s work it is possible to find this prime cause that does not pass through the filters of logic and design but flows outward onto the painting sheets.

Evan’s creative art process starts with internal feelings that are translated, almost automatically, onto the expanse of the canvas. Painting is begun and once it becomes a part of the artist existence, dialogue is initiated and the object created.

Preoccupation with the human image is no accident. It is part of the artist’s profession as a leading psychoanalyst and a psychiatrist in both Israel and New York. Sometimes Bellin sits opposite a model but usually the created image is found in his consciousness and continues to change during the act of painting, like the echo of a musical composition that first plays in the mind and then once outside develops according to a different dynamic.

Evan Hillel Bellin, a world renowned psychiatrist,
made Aliya to Israel from New York 12 years ago. Photo: Joel Leyden

The painted images from Israel signify a clear approach to emotional content and a peering within that goes beyond apparent reality. The painting itself shows daring, a bursting of power in a storm of color and energy that combines accumulated layers of color creating connection between the facticity of life and the facticity of painterliness.

In this exhibit displayed in Ra'anana, a suburb of Tel Aviv, Israel there are also some landscape paintings. Although minor in terms of the quantity of Evan’s work, his impressive technical ability and his unique approach to the act of art are also recognizable in them.

Evan Bellin studied medicine in the United States and part of his studies were done in Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. He worked as a Professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and directed a large Psychiatric Center in the Bronx. He studied family psychotherapy in Philadelphia and Psychoanalysis at Columbia University. At the same time as he was lecturing, among other things, he taught courses in the Psychology of Design at Pratt Institute School of Art in New York.

Bellin began painting at age 16, eventually ending in his own studio. He studied informally with different painters. Today, he lives in Yishuv Timrat in the North of Israel and travels frequently to work in the United States. Among his many patients are some of most the celebrated actors and actresses in the US.

The work of Evan Bellin was recently featured in a special pre Jewish Yom Kippur holiday edition of the Israel daily newspaper Haaretz.

 

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