Rabbis is a series of oil paintings drawn from the folk tradition of rabbi portraits that circulate in ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) communities, especially in Jerusalem. I’m interested in how spiritual authority is pictured—how revered figures become earthly sitters in front of a camera—and how those images read when I approach them in a secular, painterly way. By focusing on surface, scale, and framing rather than devotion, I test what remains when an icon is treated as a picture. The series shifts between reverence and observation, inquiring into how authority is produced and perceived when a sacred likeness is re-examined through the lens of the studio.
