>>KP: Do Israel and your culture play a part in the creation of your work?

>>LY: I would like to believe that even if I wasn't from there, considering where we are right now as Americans, that I would be making work that has a political response to it. But of course I think, as an Israeli, I have a more intimate relationship with conflict. I cannot separate the work from who I am, which includes growing up in the Middle East.

Could this be the reason why you create lots of work with a theme of war?

It's not about being in the service or seeing combat. It's much more subtle. There is a mindset when you grow up in Israel that war will always be. It's depressing because it's in the air. But what finally got me to tackle the subject of war was America's war in the Middle East, not specifically the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
During a lecture that I did recently, a student attacked me at the end by saying, "It would be refreshing if I just said, like John Lennon, 'Give peace a chance.'" Unfortunately, my viewer doesn't necessarily go home with of a feeling or resolve or hopefulness. I don't have the intention to do this, but this is what the work ends up doing.

So you think people misinterpret your art?

To complete my answer before, of course I dream of peace. I just think that in painting, politics function differently. There's a genre of political art right now that I don't quite fit in because the politics have a clear, polished message. I'd rather struggle through my own questions about what violence is than answer it clearly to my audience. Because that's what makes the painting function as art, not art serving politics.

You reenacted Peter Paul Rubens’ ’David Slaying Goliath’ with a U.S. Marine as a model who was back from his service in Iraq in '06. Why?

I knew the model. When I saw Rubens' piece at the Norton Simon Museum, I felt that mythology (David and Goliath) we all have is about perspective; i.e., who's telling the story. So in my painting, I asked the model to be both David and Goliath.

How about 'The Dawning of an Aspect'?

The title itself derives from Ludwig Wittgenstein's book Philosophical Investigations. The idea that an aspect of the work dawns on you at a different times is interesting for me. In the way that I paint, the viewer needs to move panoramically (or just move at different angles) because I use the same color for my figures, and I articulate them with just brush stroke with no color differentiation.
When the light hits the brush stroke on the monochromatic surface, the shape of the figures reveals itself differently depending on the angle that you are looking from.
The subject of The Dawning of an Aspect is the way that the figure and nature exist in a war landscape. There is an abstraction that is special for that landscape, which you can see in films, field photography, and painting's history. I am thinking about Goya's Disasters of War, for example.
I also feel that I am painting sculptures, and it comes from my looking at figurative sculptures and public art memorials.

Are there any particular artists that you channel?

Yeah. I think there's a big relationship with Leon Golub's paintings. I love the sculpture of Thomas Schutte. (Like his Zombies series.)

Do you find any humor or any unexpected themes in war, which others may not?

Absolutely! For example, the public memorial art has a very peculiar form. Think about the straightforwardness of the bronze sculptures.
When I am deciding where different figures in my battle painting are, I think about the ridiculousness of thinking, "Where should I place this dead body? To the right or the left?"