She focuses on thistles, prickly plants with purple flowers

Artist from war-torn north relocates to Tel Aviv, discovers success with works of kibbutz views

Doron Adorian evacuated after October 7, 2023, is welcomed by city’s art community as the ‘northern refugee.’ Now her art hangs on the wall of former US ambassador to Israel Jack Lew

TEL AVIV — On Wednesday morning, artist Doron Adorian was explaining the concept of her sun-drenched oil of purple thistles in a field of green grasses to a gathering of fellow artists.

The Rothschild Boulevard gallery was hosting Wonderwall, a weekend-long pop-up of young artists through Saturday, May 2, sponsored by home furnishings company Tollmans Dot, which was choosing three artists’ work to feature in its next collection.

Adorian is still adjusting to the realities of being an artist in Tel Aviv, although it’s been two and a half years since she and her parents left Kibbutz Sde Nechamia in the upper Galilee during the Hezbollah attacks following October 7, 2023.

What she hadn’t necessarily anticipated was the boost to her career from her new location in the country’s center, rather than the north, when she was always at a distance from Tel Aviv’s steady spin of arts and culture.

“In the north, we fought to get exhibits, and it was a totally different life,” said Adorian. “Here there’s constant art and culture and events, but somehow I burrow into myself more.”

Adorian’s canvases are layered and textured, showing the fields and grasses that grow around the kibbutz and behind her home. She focuses on thistles, the hardy, prickly plants from the daisy family, known for purple-pink flowers that turn yellow in the summer sun, and can be found throughout Israel.

The paintings of thistles and grasses strike a chord for many, from former US ambassador to Israel Jack Lew, who hung an Adorian painting in his Jerusalem home, to tourists and Israelis as well.

“People connect to these thistles,” said Adorian. “It doesn’t matter if they’re from the north or Tel Aviv, they just connect to it.”

In the first months after October 7, Adorian found herself turning away from her former work with pencil portraits and sketches, and turning to these familiar prickly weeds.

She was granted six months of free use of a Tel Aviv studio, and became part of a local artists’ collective known as HaMekarer, The Refrigerator, named for its below-ground location in what was a former fruit storage space.

Adorian settled in there, appreciating being surrounded by other artists and having a safe space underground, given the trauma she’s experienced throughout her life, with steady strikes and threats from Hezbollah in Lebanon.

“I think I took on myself the role of the artist from the north here in Tel Aviv, and somehow I became the artist of the thistles and the bomb shelter studio,” she said. “I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever stop being the arist from the north?”

And yet, that identity has been helpful, as local artists have welcomed her in this new location.

During the recent 40 days of war with Iran, Adorian stayed home at her Tel Aviv apartment, fearful to venture out when missile strikes from Iran and Hezbollah were terrorizing the city’s residents.

Instead, she ordered small 40×50 (around 15×19 inch) canvases and painted close-ups of the thistles, focusing on the geometry and visual angles of the flowers.

“It’s not by chance that I paint the spaces and the fields and the nature that surrounded me in the north,” said Adorian, who had to raise her voice to be heard over the cacophony of traffic, music and people surrounding her in the small garden outside the gallery. “Everything is more crowded here in Tel Aviv, including my studio, including the spaces around and between people.”

Throughout the first two years of the war and even now, friends and neighbors would send Adorian photos of her adored fields and spaces near the kibbutz, and she often painted from those images.

She’s still part of the northern artist community, engaged in the WhatsApp group of fellow creatives, now taking the role of urging them to send their works for consideration for different events in the country’s center.

“When I was in the north, I didn’t understand how much you have to be engaged in this process all the time,” said Adorian. “I try to bring them this world all the time, and yet I continue painting images from the north.”

She continues to show her work in any group exhibit taking place in the north, but hasn’t visited her kibbutz in months, even during the recent Israeli Memorial Day ceremony in the cemetery where her uncle, killed in a terrorist attack in Jerusalem in 2015, is buried.

“I said no, because I’m scared to go up north,” she said. “It’s not new, what’s going on there,” referring to the ongoing strikes from Hezbollah, even during the ceasefire, “and suddenly northerners who are usually so patriotic are allowing themselves to say, ‘we will not stay here at any price, we will not die here on this hill.'”

“I’m glad they’re finally saying that because now everyone understands what it’s like to be under missile attack,” she said.

For now, Adorian is known to her fellow artists as the refugee from the north in Tel Aviv, as she says, “half in and half outside” of her two communities.

“It’s already been almost three years, it’s a crazy dissonance,” she said. “And for now they welcome me here as a kind of northern refugee, but who knows if it’ll last.”

Wonderwall, 69 Rothschild Boulevard, Thursday, 6 p.m – 11:00 p.m / Friday, 10 a.m. – 4 p.m./ Saturday, 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. Entry is free, register from the link.