Gilah Hirsch

My paintings begin with an idea, association, memory, image and context. Context includes physical, emotional and intellectual surroundings. As I work in a variety of media, and in various disciplines, culture as well as landscape is invariably reflected in my work.

I respond to the new image as it is formed, stroke by stroke, wash by wash, and I arrive at unfamiliar realms. As the continuously evolving image assumes form and dimension, I continue to coax it with greater light, shadow, texture. I add new associations, words, experiences throughout the gestation of the painting. At some points I drop a wash over the entire painting. When that dries, certain aspects of the image have been obscured and certain others revealed. I continue to illuminate and obscure form until finally a thoroughly new image emerges, and seems to “breathe”. I know then that my task is to make it more of itself by tweaking the light/color/shadow to accentuate the dimensionality of the new form. In the last of the many months each work requires, (sometimes as much as a year), I sit with it, waiting for it to “ask” to add light here, or add shadow there, increase texture here, or mitigate text there. Each painting is a world of its own, with its own rationality, its own sense of space, architecture, flora & sometimes fauna.

My process is one of call & response between my inner and outer worlds, a dynamic dialog between my self & the emerging image. I call this metaphysical surrealism.

Gilah Yelin Hirsch, (BA UC Berkeley, MFA UCLA), is a painter, writer, theorist, filmmaker, lecturer and Professor of Art at California State University, Dominguez Hills (Los Angeles). An internationally exhibiting artist in over 250 exhibitions since 1968 including the Whitney Museum (NYC), the LA County Museum of Art, and acquired by many major public and private collections, including the, Skirball Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Alexander Braun Collection, Budapest and the Slovak National Museum, Hirsch’s work has been reviewed extensively worldwide and has appeared on covers and within dozens of international publications. Hirsch’s own articles and theoretical papers have been published in scholarly journals internationally (e.g. MIT’s Leonardo; International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies; Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal; Journal of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; Collections of Foreign Studies on Shamanism, Dalian Nationalities University, China); She has also authored the book Demonic to Divine: The Double Life of Shulamis Yelin (Vehicule Press). Hirsch’s film Cosmography: The Writing of the Universe, an investigation into the relation between origin of alphabet, pattern in nature and the neurology of perception and cognition, has received worldwide interdisciplinary notice. Her current film, Reading the Landscape, brings these concepts to children of all ages in sixteen languages and cultures.