Anna Pasternak began painting the series of paintings entitled “Mediterranean Scenes” as part of her ongoing treatment of questions related to the representation of reality. Her paintings are full of natural light emphasizing the open sea, the blue sky and the yellow sand – “The immense Nature”, against whose background human beings are proportionately restrained and uniform.
They serve her as a perfect backdrop to the human happenings occurring within them and as a scrutiny of the relations between the individual and himself, between himself and his fellow man and between himself and the place he is situated in.
Avigdor Aricha in relating to the function of the artist noted that the main part of the painting is experimental and the experimentation is obscure and not understood by the artist when he is working. A similar awareness arises from Pasternak’s sea paintings .Her analytical investigative occupation with the changing situations in nature and capturing the passage of time is revealed in them. Among the means she employs are diptychs; paintings in which an identical image appears a number of times on the same canvas; sub-groups of paintings dealing with the same topic; shadow falling revealing the time of day; reflections in the sea water capturing a transient moment, and others as well.
Although, Pasternak lives in Haifa and her works are identified with city’s seashore and its people, she points out that one shouldn’t relate her sea scenes to an identifiable place. In her opinion the sea is any sea, the seashore is any seashore and the people portrayed in her works are people in general. In essence, Pasternak’s group of sea paintings is a many-faceted array of works. As such it is fed both from the visual aspect and the study of western painting (from the Renaissance to the present time). Although a painting may faithfully represent reality it’s as if it gives us a brief respite from it. By hovering beyond the place and time, it is not “social” in the broad sense of the word and doesn’t try to point to systems of socio-political relationships.
In fact this is a depictive personal journey looking for the spirit in reality. Painting changing during movement, which investigates the subject of its description and imitates itself. As if it seeking a secret.

Yaniv Shapira,
Curator.