Painting is a guided vision which can be dreamed by anyone, but only the artist can embody this vision on a canvas, render in color this amazing sensation of oneself in the world. Still, not all facets of reality presume the possibility of artistic embodiment for the artist. Thus, genre preferences come to the fore. As to the paintings of Arkady Livshitz, the essence of his inspiration in the course of almost half a century has been that of landscape. With time they enrich the human soul, likewise the nature itself, latently attracting the human being. Aesthetic education of senses becomes realized only through artistic perception and comprehension.
The landscape of A. Livshitz never open up straight away before one’s eyes. They remind one of Salome muffled with a veil of hopes, reminiscences , grief, tenderness, love and its peculiar artistic colour. They beckon, lifting above the prose of life. And more than that – they arouse curiosity, a quality of no small importance in the torrent of vain tossing-about of modern art.
The capacity of the paintings of A. Livshitz to charge with positive energy, engendering one’s visual correlation with the landscape, is a peculiar distinguishing feature of the artist’s creative work. Sometimes quiet sadness, sometimes an explosion of colours, depicting emotion, but always calming and with positive affect. The feature of A. Livshitz can be referred to as an unique aesthetic phenomenon.
The highlands of Israel are visually characterized by perspective parallax. In cinema long-focal lens are frequently used, causing the same kind of the scene reflection. The background is brought nearer. It seems being closer than certain details located nearby. Thus is the principle of long-focal optics. The camera “arrives” at the foreground, which still remains soft. In many paintings of Sa-Nur (an artist’s village in Samaria) period A. Livshitz uses this principle, as, for instance, in his “Safed” on the background of a cobweb three . The background “arrives”, the world changes, and a subconscious sense of balance arises as crystallization of self-consciousness, directed not towards Zion, but to universal horizons of art as embodied in the Israeli landscapes. By the way, the Sa-Nur landscapes of A. Livshitz seem to be as if created before Creation. As if the real calendar retreated for a while. Something was forgotten, reinterpreted, merged with yourself and with everything surrounding you. And here you yourself approach the spatio-temporal dimension of what is revealed through the long-focal optics of artist. The forthcoming panels of roads pressed in the mountain ridges of track stones and rifts. A handful of the sea splashed out “on a silver bowl of stretched out eyes” (V. Khlebnikov), when you enter the canvas texture gliding on the water surface, approaching the blue Samarian mountains, which are newly coagulated from the fresh paint-brush touch of the palette-knife.
In this respect it is appropriate to mention here the new aesthetic-cultural sides of the artist’s creative work, a style jokingly labeled by the artist himself “Nouveau-Art-Nouveau”. Gravitating towards this style are such canvasas as “Horses” (2001), “Sea Gulls” (2002), paintings of the series “World Landscapes” and, in fact, all his works exhibited annually in the last few years at expositions, the most significant among them being that presented at the Tel Aviv Opera House in 2006.
How can the painting of A.Livshitz be defined? What trend can they be referred to? The very fact of raising the question only underlines the evident imperfection of the existing stylistic scale and of our artistic sense. Traditional art scholars try to put everything in good order to make us, and maybe themselves, apprehend better that or another phenomenon. The paradox is that the more the artistic manner is classified, the more active is the intrusion into the world of the art image. V. Bryusov once wrote about the criticism of a piece of art: “a violet decomposed in crucible” but art remains on the true artist’s canvas. Despite the “open-hearth furnace of art criticism”, the art is immortal. No clear-cut academic “ism” can be found in the creative work of A.Livshitz, whose paintings, as defined by a well-known professor of art, Gr. Ostrovsky, “are marked with delicate taste and fine-art culture”(“Non-stop” 15-21, 09.2000, page 31)
In the end, here it is: psychologically balanced taste and culture, imbued with a synthesis of adjacent kinds of modern art, is what defines individual searches and makes them original, notwithstanding traditional preferences and conventional taboo.

Dr. Galina Podolskaya