Our doors are closed today and tomorrow, March 4th and 5th, as we install our latest exhibitions, Portals of Perception, The Essence of Abstraction, and Mélance of Milieu. One of the artists showing in The Essence of Abstraction is returning Agora artist, Varda Yoran, whose compelling story has informed her equally compelling sculptures.

Varda Yoran was born in China in 1929 to Jewish parents who had emigrated from Russia. Immediately, she was exposed to various cultures through her family, her schooling, and the constant political struggle for power in the East. Varda was a first-hand witness to World War II, the Japanese occupation of China, the communist takeover, and the declaration of Israel’s independence.

Varda Yoran with Gallery Director, Angela Di Bello, at her 2014 exhibition.

Making her home in Israel in 1949, she served in the Israeli Air Force and married her husband, Shalom. Shalom has his own extraordinary story, having survived the Holocaust after fighting against Nazis in the forests of Eastern Europe. Almost 50 years later, Varda helped him translate his memoir into English, which was published under the title “The Defiant” in 1996. And during all of these major events, she has continued her work as an artist and used art as an outlet for her emotions, her stories, and her voice.

We had the opportunity to speak with Varda about how these countless experiences have been carried into her work as an artist.

You’ve mentioned in the past that you have experimented with a variety of mediums and styles during your career as an artist. How did you get into sculpture?

Somehow I couldn’t find a niche that I was really comfortable with. When I was about 50, shortly after we came to the states…that’s when I turned to sculpture. I started simply for fun. I said, let’s see what will happen if I change mediums and start sculpting, and it gripped me.

What is your artistic process?

I have a very precise idea before I start working. In painting, you take a brush and you spread it spontaneously over the canvas and capture the mood that you feel at the moment, but in sculpture, it takes much longer, and it’s harder to work with. You can’t maintain that emotion for weeks or months, so I try to think of how to express it visually in an abstract way. Once I’ve figured out how to express it, I just work from that plan in my head. I have it in my mind. I know exactly what I’m going to do. My favorite medium was stone because when you’re working on it, for the most part, it looks like something that you just picked up outside, and the more you smooth it, the more the colors come out. There are such surprises sometimes.

Varda Yoran, Tai Chi

Many of your works in your upcoming exhibition have titles related to Chinese culture. How has China had an influence on your style as an artist?

When I was in China, I had very little exposure to art. We were really cut off from the rest of the world. I was in an exhibition of non-Asians who were interested in Asian Art. I have some Asian themes in my work, like in my sculpture, Tai Chi (above), which is going to be in the current exhibition. You know, I went back to China 50 years after I left. I was writing about it, and I said that it’s like meeting a friend after 50 years: you have changed and become unrecognizable and so has your friend, and that’s how I felt going back.

You were a social worker in the Israeli Air Force. Could you tell us a little about what that was like?

There was a tremendous influx of immigrants into Israel. The young men of military age who would come in were given a year to settle in and then they would go into the army. So if they had a wife and children, then the army would support them, and if they didn’t have children, the wife was supposed to work and support herself, while her husband was doing his military duty. My job was to see who would need the help. I had to check that it was genuine. I traveled around the country a lot for that.

Once, a guy came in (he was from Yemen), and I was filling out his papers because he didn’t know how to write Hebrew. When I reached how many children do you have, he was sitting across the desk from me and counting and counting and counting. He said 4. I asked,  ‘Why were you counting?’ He said, ‘Because the rest are girls.’ He was only counting the boys! What did he think I wanted to know? He had to sit and count and sort them out!

Varda Yoran, Shall We Dance

How have your experiences in WWII and your knowledge of your husband’s time as a partisan fighter in WWII affected your artwork?

All of these experiences are very different than the regular way of life and have influenced my life. As for my husband being a partisan during the war, I have several sculptures dealing with the topic of the holocaust. It’s the same feeling as anyone who has survived any major disaster. It’s applicable to any kind of disaster. What I’m trying to capture in my work is the universality of emotion and of movement. That’s why there are no details in my work, because if you add a face or something, you’d pin the artwork down.

You have said that you art is meant to tell a story and provide insight into the meaning of humanity in modern times. In your opinion, what does it mean to be human today?

What I’m trying to show is that people are composed of all the same emotions in different proportions. Everybody has a measure of kindness, a measure of viciousness, a measure of pain, of sensitivity, of greed…everybody has a measure of everything. The proportions are what differentiate one human from another. People haven’t changed. They’ve always been this way.

“That’s why there are no details in my work, because if you add a face or something, you’d pin the artwork down.”

I see that every person has one major trait, and it’s like a spine in the body. The ribs and the arms and the limbs come from that spine and they come in different ways, but if you catch the spine of the person, you will understand them completely. I try to find the spine in people that interest me.

How has sculpture helped you capture the “spine” of the people or things that interest you?

One of my sculptures has three figures. You can see that there is a strong, straight, firm person, there is a more gentle person, and there is a little person joining them. In some families, the man is the strong one, in some families the woman is the strong one, and in some there is a man and a man or a woman and a woman. In a very abstract way, you can pick up the family in any sculpture. Once, I was with a little boy walking around and we came to my piece on family. I asked if he saw family in it, and he saw his three brothers in the family and not the parents at all! It’s open to interpretation.

Varda Yoran with guest during her 2014 exhibition.

How do your sculptures act as your voice?

You look at Picasso’s work, the intensity and the variety, and you know he had a lot to say. And he said it in his own way. All the great artists did that. You know, actually, there isn’t anything that’s new, just how you show it. There are so many images of family, of war, of hate, of love, of animals, and it’s just a matter of how you present it. That’s the difference between one artist and another.

Varda Yoran’s work will be on display in The Essence of Abstraction from March 6 to March 26, 2015, with an opening reception on March 12th, from 6 – 8 PM. Her works can also be viewed and purchased at ARTmine.com →