Tavalina paints houses. Her own old house, the hills behind it, a neighbor's wall, a kitchen in morning light, a corner of a room with flowers on the table — and the places she has traveled to, Rome, Verona, Bardolino, Jerusalem. The paint goes on thick with a palette knife, so the surface holds the mark of the tool and the light sits on top of it.
She was an architect first. Rinat Kishony graduated from the Technion in 1992, worked in Tel Aviv, and won the competition to redesign the multimedia museum devoted to David Ben-Gurion. Then, in her thirtieth year, a personal crisis. She went to her room, found a discarded box of crayons and began to draw — "as if I was in a trance, the paintings were flowing out of me, and until this very day I haven't stopped." She left architecture and Israel, traveling through India, Costa Rica and Guatemala before settling in Italy for a decade.
She came back and trained again — a master's in art therapy, and she now works as a supervising art therapist. Her practice and her painting meet at Soteria Sharon, a residential house that treats psychological crisis as part of ordinary human experience rather than as illness, and works to keep people out of hospital. She leads its Salon at Kibbutz Ein Shemer, where one of the weekly programs is an open studio, the Artists' Greenhouse.
Amos Oz's family chose her painting Jerusalem for the cover of Œuvres, his collected works, published by Gallimard. She has shown at the Italian Cultural Institute in Haifa and in galleries in Antibes, Treviso, London, Milan and Verona. She lives and paints in Aviel, in the northern Sharon.
Read more about Tavalina — the architect who found a box of crayons.
"Where the Infinite Starts"
Tavalina's first solo exhibit at Art House SF in September of 2021. "The white canvas, for me, is the embodiment of freedom: it contains an infinite number of possibilities."
Book Cover
The famous Israeli novelist Amos Oz's family selected Tavalina's painting "Jerusalem" to be on the front cover of his latest book, "Œuvres".
"Windows Beyond"
Tavalina returns to Art House SF for her second solo exhibit, "Windows Beyond".
Painting during the COVID-19 pandemic, Tavalina wanted to paint a “dialogue” between her inner world and the outer world with a window separating the two.
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