Hadas Tal | Up Close and Far Away

Ultimately, it is the fascination with how to make the paint evolve into a conceivable image that I find most engaging. - Hadas Tal

Hadas Tal paints the quiet, joyful moments of everyday life. A beautiful urban vista, a delicious dessert, flowers in a vase--finding and celebrating extreme beauty in the simple pleasures of life are the language of Tal’s work. Thick layers of oil paint are pushed across wood panels to create the intense gestural topography of Tal’s surfaces, revealing a reverence for paint as a transformative medium.

Often working within a limited palette, sometimes 8-10 colors at once, Tal forgoes a graphite sketch, and instead applies paint directly and immediately to the surface of her works, blocking out dark colors, leaving space and gaps for lighter areas. After the base composition is established the experimentation with color can begin. Tal often discusses the joy she finds in mixing paint: “over and over again, I can spend hours doing it.”

Tal’s source imagery is often taken from walks or observation from daily life. She works from a combination of both self-generated source material and visual intuition. While capturing a representational image is central to her artistic practice, she isn’t interested in every aspect of the image. Certain shapes and colors are pursued, while other aspects are left behind in pursuit of the most compelling image. What emerges is an impossibly harmonious convergence of abstraction, realism, tonality, color temperature, values, linear marks and high contrast moments.

Born in Israel, but with her painting career taking shape in American urban enclaves New York and the Bay Area, Tal has recently found herself relocated to the lush and verdant scenery of North Carolina. This relocation shows up in her new body of work. Deep greens are now present, reflecting the emerald tones predominant in her new state. The towering rectangles and squares of her earlier urban landscapes have been replaced with the triangles and v-shaped roofs of suburban tableaus.

Always a reflection of her mind’s eye, Hadas Tal’s works are shifting with the energy of a different place, a new daily joy to be captured in oil.