Coffee and Sandwich，Zefat (2022) Painting by Severn (Jie Cheng) Wang

Safed, a city in northern Israel, is one of the highest cities in Israel in terms of altitude (900 meters). Due to its special location, the Crusaders, the Ayyubid dynasty and the Mamluk Empire all built large military fortresses here in history. The city is also mentioned once in the Bible.

In 1492, as a result of the Spanish Alhambra Decree, a large number of Jews came to settle in Zefat, which gradually developed into a center of wool and textile production, and became a center of Kabbalah scholarship. Jewish tradition ranks Zefat among the four holy cities, along with Jerusalem, Hebron, and Tiberias.

We left Tiberias in the morning of our trip and arrived in Zefat by bus at almost 2:30 pm. We wanted to find a place to make up for lunch and then go sightseeing. There was a small roadside cafe not far from the station, so we decided to go for it!

While we were eating and drinking, the owner of the store had nothing better to do than to chat with us. The owner was very excited to learn that we were from China and told us that he was going to Guangzhou next week to celebrate the Jewish holiday with his fellow Jews who live and work there and was looking forward to it.

This incident was one of the most impressive things that happened during our trip to Israel that year.

The small store on the left side of the picture is the cafe we patronized that day. There are many cars parked on the side of the road in Zefat from memory. My years of experience in creating street scenes have taught me not to intentionally paint too many details of the cars, but to use shapes and lines to suggest the cars in the picture and let the viewer imagine the details themselves. One of the advantages of painting is that you can "create something out of nothing". I included a red bus in the center of the image to suggest where we were getting off (although they should have been further apart on the actual map). The sunlight in Israel is always strong, so I blurred the distant part on the right side of the picture. One is to create a visual sense of strong sunlight, and the other is to increase the visual depth of the picture.

After the picture was finished, I felt that the blue color of the sky and the yellow color of the road looked a bit monotonous, yet they occupied a more important position in the picture and were left alone to affect the visual movement in the picture. So I added wires, street lights, poles and other line elements to the sky, cutting the sky into several blocks, and adding a pedestrian to the road to make the picture look more vivid. The contrast shows that the painting is not a simple copy of the real scene or reference photos, every element in the picture is designed and arranged by the artist.

Related themes

IsraelSafedJewishHoly CityJudaism