The
Artist

Aaron has been drawing since the age of six. His parents recognized the gift early and sent him to study with leading artists — David Wakstein’s studio, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and later the HIT Holon Institute of Technology, where he developed his abstract visual language.

Even as a child, he was never interested in copying what he saw. He was looking for something he hadn’t yet found — a way to make the invisible visible. A way to put feeling on canvas.

A decisive encounter came through visits to the private studio of master painter Avi Feiler — one of the few artists he allowed inside. Feiler shared with Aaron something rarely given: not instruction, but revelation. He spoke of “butterflies in the stomach” — the feeling that must arrive at the start of every new canvas, or else the work should not begin. And he described his own process as simply being a witness: “I am only a bystander to what is happening.” He gathers from life — observing, absorbing, collecting — and then follows those butterflies onto the canvas.

Aaron carried both of these gifts forward. The permission to feel before you paint. The discipline to wait until you do.

The turning point came in the studio of Huvy Elisha — Jerusalem’s great post-impressionist, whose work earned her a place among the most significant Israeli painters of her generation. Aaron served as her senior studio assistant for years, working alongside her canvases and absorbing something that cannot be learned from a curriculum.

Huvy taught him to pursue the spiritual essence of a subject rather than its physical detail. Whether painting a figure or a landscape, the goal is to portray the intrinsic self of the subject — what is felt, not merely seen. That philosophy became the heartbeat of everything Aaron creates.

The question she asked him every time he arrived — “Did you come to help me making the world happier?” — is not decorative. It is a mission statement. It is what every painting is still trying to answer.