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Amili Gelbman

An Artistic Journey in a Foreign City

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Chapter 1: Shakedown Cruise / Testing the Waters

The connection with Amili was forged about a month before departing on the journey. This month-long window proved to be pure gold. It was an opportunity to build alignment, a quality time to observe how we bridge differences through clarification, and above all, through constant feedback and candid expression. Honesty was essential for both of us; it was a chance to touch the delicate nerves of arousal and vulnerability that characterize being alone in a foreign city. This month was an indispensable period to pinpoint the precise nature of the artistic accompaniment. It was time, precious beyond measure, to pave the way for our interaction—to establish the order, the pace, the framework. It is akin to how Amili would organize her settling-in process in a foreign city to enable her creative work and confront uncertainty: through a daily routine, materials, and structure. The same applies to the accompaniment; so that it may become a sanctuary for our relationship, this preparatory month nurtures our partnership beautifully.

"Red Apple in Naples" encapsulates in a brief, poignant image the expectation that tirelessly searched for words: that at the end of the journey, there would be something tangible in hand—an apple, something concrete, a synthesis based on the documentation. The moment this "apple" was born, a shared intention materialized in the blink of an eye. Yes, there will be an apple!

This pre-journey month revealed itself as a pilot, a fractal that hints at the entire whole—at the journey itself. A preliminary testing of the waters. What is beautiful about it is how much evolves and unfolds: our communication, the emerging norms, the agreements, a mutual acquaintance from a different vantage point—such as attentiveness to sensitivities, overcoming creative blocks, and reciprocal learning alongside the technical and procedural aspects. Naturally, much remains cloaked in mystery and uncertainty, which lie at the very core of the journey.

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Chapter 2: Settling In – Feeling at Home in a Foreign City

"Scusi,"

"T’o Napoli t’o rno sensazionale"

An artist arrives in a foreign city, whose language she does not speak and whose paths she does not know. She enters a hotel...

The hotel room is the studio. A studio that Amili organized, designed to serve a singular need: the need to create! After all, the specific characteristics of the room carry immense weight due to their influence on the state of mind, being a source of inspiration in themselves.

On one hand, "I received millions of keys yesterday from Mario," Amili says of ancient keys in an ancient hotel, which serve as "an entry ticket to the studio, like stepping into a fairy tale. The studio is vast and precise, except there is no balcony..." Amili examines the boundaries of her territory and what it contains, given that this space is her workspace—the holy of holies where thoughts are translated into blots and lines. On the other hand, a question arises: how will the outside world seep inward despite the absence of a balcony? Anyone arriving at an apartment that will be theirs for a period of time examines, among other things, the presence of openings. The opening connects the room to the world; it lets in air and broadens the internal gaze. The soul desperately craves an opening, a window, a balcony.

And here—

"There is a corridor, followed by windows looking out into an inner courtyard with construction scaffolding; in the distance, you can see the peeling buildings of old, neglected Naples." Amili's reference to the corridor is fascinating; it is the link between the world outside and the studio within. It is not enough to withdraw into a room; there is a need for an opening to guide the eyes outward. There is something in searching outward through the window while the artist remains in the room, a desire to feel freedom, the incoming air, to sense the absence of boundaries despite the need for boundaries to feel secure. A window—to receive inspiration, to exist within inspiration.

An artist arrives in a foreign city, whose language she does not speak and whose paths she does not know. She begins to settle in and cultivate a sense of home.

For an artist, this can be achieved in various ways: familiarity with the surroundings, recognizing the recurring occurrences in the locale, or adapting to local daily rhythms. Amili notices the figures of Naples, which connect her to a sense of authenticity. Objects in the environment become familiar, whether through contemplation or through photographs. Women conversing across balconies, a colorful figure of an angel in a derelict alleyway, and other moments captured by the camera lens. All of these transform into images that become brushstrokes birthing a new reality. Reality as art.

The identification of "home" moments is striking during her wanderings through the city. "I saw him in a bookstore on the street by the sea. The only acquaintance from home in all the foreignness of the street. Afterwards, I couldn't forget him..." Picasso’s familiar countenance appeared on a book cover in the bookstore. Amidst new discoveries, an encounter with familiar objects softens the sense of foreignness. Picasso’s image seeped into the canvas, rewoven with additional forms, becoming a work of art. Art is home.

Indeed, for Amili, Home in the absolute sense is the artwork itself. The moment an artist takes up her brush and wanders with it across the canvas, the familiar sensation of the creative process emerges. The body and soul enlist in a known manner. The experience is etched into the skin, awakening a sense of security and warmth.

An artist arrives in a foreign city, whose ways she begins to know, and encounters her own path anew. A little bit of home is born.

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Chapter 3: Gathering Inwards – Entering the Cave

In optics, convergence (gathering) refers to light rays meeting at a focal point, while divergence refers to light rays emanating outward from that focal point.

In an artist’s journey, one can witness a similar movement—inward and outward. Outward from the focal point of the "Self" toward the sources of inspiration provided by the city; and inward, like entering a cave, into the soul, memory, and creation.

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Sources of Inspiration

Her discoveries during her wanderings brought Amili face-to-face with walls of peeling plaster, exposed electrical wires and pipes dangling between buildings, graffiti, narrow alleys, and balconies almost touching across the street. Materials from life. And also a familiar image on a book cover. A trail of these images can be traced within the paintings.

Yet, it is not only concrete materials, easily perceived, that arrive at the artist's doorstep and consciousness. There are also sensations and experiences of human encounters, like the one with Caterina in the café, who "loves Oscar Wilde" and also shared her personal story.

These materials—both the physical and the emotional—become familiar, close, digestible; they can be addressed, stepped off from, and infused into the artwork. "There must always be something in my painting that is familiar. Figurative. An accuracy of material..."

Conversely, sources of inspiration are the raw material of creation, and foreignness is their primary supplier. The gaze of a creator in a foreign city is a new, fresh, pristine gaze that fosters the experience of inspiration. Nothing there, in Naples, belongs to Amili’s world, and by virtue of this, the city and its manifold stimuli flood the consciousness, the body, and the soul. Sources of inspiration are a vital necessity for Amili as an artist; they are "a kind of food." It is "like being inside a movie, experiencing the scenes within it," and afterwards, one exits the movie into the screening room...

Naples, specifically, summoned an experience of authenticity for Amili. The sights of the city and its inhabitants, women talking across balconies in Naples, a meticulously kept shelf with a picture of saints in the city of Salerno, the entry of light through an iron grate at different hours of the day, ancient buildings. All of these, along with the interactions with locals, shape the sense of authenticity. This authenticity is a source of inspiration like a spring, where there is no need to name this or that specific thing, but rather to let the entire current lead Amili to her creative realms.

As Amili puts it: "Inspiration requires a relationship. It is a sort of spoiled child who enters the room only when the guests she likes have stayed..." And Amili certainly opened a wide door for her, inviting her to enter...

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The Cave

Inspiration "enters," as Amili says, but the journey possesses its own DNA, so different from a tourist's holiday. Tourists, too, are flooded with stimuli, but a significant phase is required for exposure to foreignness to transform into a journey—a journey of creation.

Amili hints: "May I find my life there inside..."

For a time, the artist undergoes inner turmoil; personal life blends with discoveries made during her wanderings. Spiritual work demands energy! The mood shifts, turning somber for a moment. It is born from the reflection of the foreign city inward, as if illuminating dark corners within the internal world, in life itself, not in art. Issues surface for confrontation; heavy emotions arise. Attention is distracted from art; life as it is floats up and becomes fully visible. These are moments of pause in the fervor of creation. A kind of invitation for the mind-body to update, synchronize, re-evaluate, to be still and listen. These are moments when external stimuli become irrelevant. As Amili writes, it is an entry into "the cave." Amili shares her hesitation: "Weariness from the road, losing focus again, mixed feelings about whether I need to leave the cave I created, I already felt so good there...". The feeling of the "cave" is a pause in the constant motion to quench the thirst for inspiration. A sense of heaviness accompanied by introspection. This stage, which follows the settling-in, is essential for the creation of meaning. "Gathering inward... is essential to creation. There is a limit to the amount of foreignness a work of art can endure."

Interestingly, at this moment, the awareness of the heaviness of food intensifies. "The food in Italy is really not for me, all the time dough, cakes, cookies, greasy food, delicious but annoying, a heavy price of kilograms for this journey..."

The stay in the "cave" gave birth to artworks. "These movements in smearing the paint allow me to rest... from the path of life’s winding track..."

In the painting "Jeans Cloud" (Anan Jeans), a reflection from the mirror offers a glimpse of Amili from eye level and above—a mirror that so vividly reflects her presence in the "cave." The sky above the mirror is cast in a black hue, yet a colorful patch peeks through, reminiscent of the energy of the authentic graffiti photographed time and again. The figure of Picasso in the painting "In the Bookstore" connects directly to the encounter with the book about Picasso in that very shop. Picasso's figure—something familiar from home. In both paintings, there are traces of antique objects, an ancient mirror, and the ironwork of a gate. Droplets of Naples seeping into the canvas!

"Creation is an inward gathering to see yourself with greater clarity; there is a secret here... it asks to confront you with your identity..." Amili demonstrates in her unique way how vital it is to dwell for a time in the "cave" and also "to penetrate the outer shell, to see yourself within the universe..."

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Chapter 5: Time Travel – A Spiritual Sensation

"Enrico explained that I must gesture to the driver, otherwise he won't stop... I'm waiting at the station, but an elderly woman arrived, she'll make the signals..."

Amili sets out on a captivating route, the Amalfi Coast, encountering picturesque towns and breathtaking vistas:

"The experiences coat me, the powerful landscape of Amalfi. Unforgettable. Walking inside a fairy tale."

"4 in the morning... listen to the murmurs... 'There are church bells ringing that I miss all the time, it's immense...'."

"They are familiar within being the human experience. They are perfection... being present together with my ancestors who lived in Europe during prehistoric times... here it all began... connected to the divine, to the ultimate Creator... something mystical, almost religious..."

Amili expresses wonder, existing in a state of flow, a spiritual frame of mind.

This frame of mind differs from the previous, introspective one, as she is on the road, transitioning from one picturesque town to another. Indeed, the artworks from this part of the journey are ink drawings of figures and objects. Drawing allows for a lightness and swift movement that characterizes Amili at this stage, after settling in, after entering the cave: the sense of meaning in creation! This stage brings forth answers to unformulated, elusive questions that lie at the foundation of an artist's journey.

"There is a secret here, like that young student who asked me, 'Am I supposed to enjoy this?'... Yes, dear boy, you are supposed to build yourself a life and an identity that you will rejoice in, despite the unbearable difficulty that is the reality of your life. Right now... creation provides a path, but it holds a secret. The secret to the solution is you yourself. To see the beauty and rejoice. Yes, it is you!". And in essence, Amili is speaking to herself! During the preparation phase before the journey, I suggested to Amili a thought about a secret—what is the secret she is going to discover, what is the mystery to solve, what is the question to answer. The word "secret" initially stirred a lack of clarity.

"The secret to the solution is you yourself"—Amili's answer towards the conclusion of the journey.

The journey along the Amalfi Coast gave birth to new works: "Before Dawn," "Caterina 73," and "Untitled No. 5." One can observe in them a synthesis between worlds—those people capable of looking deep into the universe and themselves; past and present become one, outside and inside together. In the drawing of the spire in "Before Dawn," there is a reflection of both the turreted structure seen through the window in the present (gaining a human expression) and the private figure emerging from memory.

In the painting "Caterina 73," dark brushstrokes evoke a sense of night, a woman's figure, and a window through which the light of celestial bodies is reflected. The curtain on the window is so thin that it barely creates a barrier between the outside and the inside. A figure close to the heart and an object from an Italian journey.

The untitled painting also brings together figures from life with a new object from the journey. Foreignness is essential to inspiration until the moment the latter is born and takes shape: the foreign and the familiar have become a single entity!

These works came to fruition on the penultimate day, following Amili's return to Naples: "It is pouring rain. It seems I will be able to focus and work. I will ask Mario to check out of the room later..." and afterwards... "Outside it is raining and snowing, the cold is severe... the flakes are large...". It is as if the development of Amili’s journey is synchronized with the weather. It is time to gather inward once more, to halt the accessibility to external stimuli, to warm up inside, in the "cave" anew—a slightly different cave, with a vastly different frame of mind.

Amili’s spiritual experience shines through her words and her photographs.

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Chapter 6: Parting / Farewell

"The snow didn't hold up and melted, now the sun peeks out, a special, festive day..." and the next day: "The city of Naples is quiet. Clean white snow. Wrapping it in pure white, the flakes grow larger by the moment. They flutter. The building is suddenly wrapped in a white blanket... you can hear the silence..."

The weather outside—a white mantle, and the feeling inside—both speak of festivity. A singular sensation.

As in any farewell, the heart wishes to generate some continuity, not to sever, not to leave a vacuum—especially when the bond and the experience forged are deeply meaningful. Here, Amili’s paintings act as transitional objects, keeping intact the delicate threads Amili wove during her journey with the city of Naples and its surroundings.

"Scusi,"

"T’o Napoli t’o rno sensazionale"

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Chapter 7: Afterword / Epilogue

My correspondence with Amili began before the journey commenced. Amili wrote: "As he noted in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky felt that an authentic artist—one who creates out of an internal necessity—stands at the topmost vertex of a moving triangle. This dynamic triangle advances and penetrates into the future..." Thus wrote Amili. This journey, in all likelihood, penetrates into the future, and from the vantage point of the present, its contribution cannot yet be precisely articulated.

In her photographs of Naples, Amili searched primarily for the authentic—as Kandinsky wrote, the simple and the everyday. This was done through a constant search for focus and framing, and a positive valuation of the sense of foreignness that summons sources of inspiration. The focus is related to order in confronting uncertainty, and foreignness is perceived as an invitation for inspiration.

This is what I wrote to Amili before the start of the journey: "In the midst of the process, what arises spontaneously, what grows out of uncertainty—the creation itself—is the expression of natural organization and an order that manifests on its own. What is interesting in your process..." so I write to Amili, "the more you interact with the environment, the people, the sights, the more order establishes itself... the chaos of spontaneity throughout this entire journey generates a wondrous order, reminding me of the concept of entropy... in short, you can trust the process."

Indeed, regarding order—based on the documentation of the accompaniment and its interpretation—Amili underwent a journey akin to the stages of psychological development (inspired by Erikson's stages of development). This began with a foray into a new world and settling in, an acquaintance with foreignness and befriending it (Naples, part one); through a maturation that is an "entry into the cave" of a heavy frame of mind (Naples, continued); through wonder and a connection to creation (the Amalfi trip); through a return to the cave, a sort of late maturation that is fertile with creation (Naples, phase two); and culminating in a farewell dressed in white. A journey of an artist in motion between the outside and the inside, within time, and in a creation that fuses eras together, inside a city named Naples.

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Rachel Ben Menachem

Fields: Group Facilitation, Coaching, Mentoring, Professional Supervision, Adult Therapy, Group Therapy.