doron adorian

קוצים / Kotzim

For me, the north is a place where everything happens outdoors - the light, the weather, the contours of the landscape, and the thorns themselves. The exposed, elemental quality of this environment seeped into my work and became part of its foundation. There is a constant tension there between tenderness and harshness, between the beauty of nature and the difficulty of living within it.

The thorns I paint embody, for me, something essential about this place: simplicity alongside a rugged beauty, resilience in changing conditions, strength alongside the capacity to wound. They carry within them my own experience - both personal and collective - within the physical, social, and emotional landscape I come from.

For the past three years, I have been living and working in Tel Aviv, far from the fields of the Upper Galilee. My studio is located two floors underground. It is also a protected space, a shelter in the literal sense of the word, and it is there that I feel safe. From within this enclosed, subterranean space, I continue to paint, again and again, the thorns of the north - its vegetation, its light, and its open expanses, which remain, for me, the landscape of home.

Distance has also changed the way I look at this landscape. It is no longer simply the environment in which I live, but a place I remember, long for, carry with me, and attempt to reconstruct from somewhere else. In this sense, nature becomes a kind of self-portrait. Through the thorns, I explore the meeting point between inner and outer worlds, between person and place, between beauty and difficulty, and in recent years, between proximity and distance.

The poet Shaul Tchernichovsky wrote: “A person is nothing but the imprint of their native landscape.” For me, this connection to the Upper Galilee is no longer dependent on my physical presence there. The landscape continues to exist within me, and perhaps it is precisely the distance from it that has made it even more present in my work. Life in the north taught me something about living in the margins along a border, in a place where the realities of the Middle East continually shift and reshape themselves. Today, I paint that same edge from an entirely different kind of space: in the center of Tel Aviv, two floors underground. Nature is no longer simply the environment in which I live.

It is memory, belonging, distance - and a central character in the story of my life.