The Bay Area lies 10,000 miles from Israel, but Michael Kovner covers the distance in mere brushstrokes. With his eye for light and line, the Israeli painter sees much in common between the two regions.
“There’s something very similar between [the Bay Area] and Israel,” he says, “because in both the mountains divide the country between the desert and the sea. The [California] sky reminds me of Israel, though the light is softer. Still, it’s the same conflict: The light comes from water and the desert.”
Art lovers can see what he’s talking about with “The Mountain and the Sea,” a solo exhibition of Kovner landscapes painted in Israel and Sausalito, now on display at the George Krevsky Gallery in San Francisco. The exhibit marks Kovner’s West Coast gallery premiere.
Though based in Israel most of the year, Kovner travels often and considers New York City a second home. But he has a special fondness for Northern California, having spent a summer painting here two years ago.
Kovner has experimented with abstracts and figures — once doing a series depicting little Lego characters — but landscapes remain his forte. Typical Kovner canvases may include images of clustered Arab homes, the Negev wastes, Judean hills, Ashdod harbor or sandy Mediterranean shorelines.
“With landscapes, I’m still much more comfortable to express my feelings,” he says.
Kovner is not the first artist in the family, though his father, celebrated Israeli poet Abba Kovner, made his reputation in an entirely different venue.
“My father was a partisan in the Vilna ghetto,” says Kovner, who grew up on Kibbutz Ein-HaChoresh near Hadera. “He wrote about the Holocaust, so in a way my art went in the opposite direction. I devoted my art to the experience of living landscapes, the living land.”
At 58, Kovner is as old as the modern Jewish state itself. He served in the HQ reconnaissance helicopter patrol, an elite unit of the Israel Defense Forces, with Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu. While he doesn’t look back on those days with great fondness, he credits his time in the skies with deepening his appreciation for Israel’s unique topography.
After his military service, Kovner moved to Manhattan in the early 1970s to study painting at the New York Studio School. During that time he supported himself by working as a security guard at the Israeli consulate. In 1976 he settled permanently in Jerusalem, a city he has attempted to capture on canvas countless times.
Over the years, Kovner had one-man exhibits at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Yale University, the Ann Loeb Bronfman Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Jewish Museum in New York. He was also part of a group exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.
Kovner’s reputation has spread worldwide, making him one of the best known and most admired Israeli artists. His career takes him away from Israel often, but he says there is an upside to that.
“Getting away gives you fresh eyes,” he says. “In Israel sometimes it gets very dense. You need the space of going away and seeing things again, to see it as it is, even to fall in love with it again.”
In addition to painting, Kovner teaches, having been on the staff of Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. And though he is an acknowledged master of landscapes, he says few of his students show much interest in that niche. “The young generation is very up to date, but not interested in painting landscapes. It’s not very popular.”
Besides being an art teacher, Kovner is a student — of Judaism. Since the mid-’70s he’s studied with Rabbi David Hartman at the Shalom Hartman Institute.
Which probably only reinforces his devotion to the land of Israel, both as a Jew and as an artist. “The land has its own quality not connected with who’s living on it,” he says. “If you capture the character of the land you capture the people.”
“Michael Kovner: The Mountain and the Sea” is on display 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, May 4 through June 17, at the George Krevsky Gallery, 77 Geary St., S.F. Information: (415) 397-9748.