By Irvin H. Jacobs

SAN DIEGO— Artist Rhea Carmi reported to this writer that she has assigned her artwork into three themes over her career.  The first two themes, “Humanity’s Struggles” and “Humanity’s Resilience” preoccupied her for most of her art career, until recently when she embarked on a third theme, “Everlasting Spirit."

Her works will be shown through May 11 in the Gotthelf Art Gallery of the Lawrence Jewish Community Center, 4126 Executive Drive, in  the La Jolla section of San Diego.  The exhibit's opening was March 16.

Born in Jerusalem in 1942, Carmi worked as a physiology researcher in the lab of a professor at the Hebrew University until 1974.  She recalled that her father, a builder, had introduced her to the hand tools of his trade.  She was facile with her hands.

She was strongly affected by the death of her brother-in-law as a POW in the Sinai campaign of Israel’s 1967 Six Day War.  She became preoccupied with the waste that wars and hatreds have caused, against a background of general struggle of humans for survival.  Despite all the obstacles, she still observed that mankind demonstrates a remarkable resilience to survive and better his world.  Strong images filled her mind.

In 1974, she left the lab to study visual arts at Tel-Aviv Open University until 1976, and to begin her art career as an abstract artist, which emphasizes painting and forms of appliquéd mixed media.  She added training at the Ramat-Gan Institute for the Arts 1977-79.  She has lived in the Los Angeles area since 1981, presently in the Northridge community.

Her largest work series, Humanities Struggles, is represented in 21 of the 29 works in the Gotthelf Gallery.  There is a strong representation of the horrors of war and of imprisonment, but also the shocks of tragic mischiefs and other events.  These latter include the 9-11-2001 jet crashes into New York’s World Trade Center towers, and the failed re-entry Feb 1, 2003 of the Columbia Space Shuttle that resulted in the loss of seven astronauts, including Israeli Ilan Ramon.

These works are in bold monotonic colors, bright reds, oranges, yellows, green, and black, juxtaposed against each other.  They contain floating letters from ancient languages, heavily in Hebrew, which suggest struggles that began far back in recorded history.  They tend to elicit strong feelings of sadness, even anger, via rather simple stark images.

Number one of the Struggles series emphasizes with some optimism that the Jewish people can prevail.  This is symbolized by a centerpiece image of a Tallit Koton (a small tzizit-fringed undergarment), despite being saturated with blood.

The Resilience theme images, she emphasized, are often not distinguishable from those in the Struggles series.  In the show, they are represented by mixed media on five canvases.  One is a simulated reproduction of the heroic King Uzziah’s burial inscription. Uzziah ruled the southern kingdom of Judah in ancient Israel 785-734 BCE..  Having suffered leprosy, he was not buried with the other kings of the House of David.  Ultimately his bones were moved to the Mount of Olives, where the inscription is found.  Another canvas depicts a woman, humbly at prayer.

Carmi reported that materials particularly move her.  This harkens back to what she learned as a child from her father.  She is comfortable using scraps of wood, a worn pencil, a discarded screwdriver, even tar and desert sand, in her compositions.  She applies texture, freely layered, in her works. She emphasized that she typically has to work fast with her materials, as the composites tend to solidify rapidly.  Accordingly, her images tend to be simple.  She often relies on her husband to prepare a sand mortar or textured canvases, for her work.  A black tar or bloodlike paint is allowed to flow irregularly down or through a composition, in her efforts to transfer her passionate feelings onto canvas. 

Inspired by the arrivals of her four grandchildren, Rhea Carmi only relatively recently embarked on her most recent series, labeled “Everlasting Spirit.”  To this writer, the most graphic of the three pieces of this series in this show is subtitled “Seeds of Life-2004.”  It centers on the image of an abstract pomegranate, filled with colorful seeds.  In addition to the fertility suggested, Jewish tradition holds that the pomegranate contains 613 seeds, representing the full complement of the commandments in the Torah.

An addendum, a display of  six small-framed reliefs depicting finds of Ancient Lands was placed on the lobby wall outside the Gotthelf Art Gallery.  These demonstrate Carmi's bent for texture and relief, typically achieved with the help of her husband.

The show opening was originally planned to kick off with an address by Carmi to a seated audience in the Viterbi Family Galleria, just outside the Gotthelf Art Gallery.  At the last minute, she changed this to a guided tour of the canvases, which did not serve her works well since her stops at the 29 pieces were hasty and disruptive.  She would have done better with prepared remarks to a quietly seated audience.  Actually the labels accompanying her canvases were adequately informative for a viewer to leisurely review and contemplate each work.