Written by Alessandra Amin

Vladimir Tamari was born in Jerusalem in 1942. After completing his primary and secondary educations at a Quaker school in Ramallah, he went on to study physics and art at the American University of Beirut. In 1963, Tamari spent a year at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London, after which he spent another year at Pendle Hill School Quaker Center of Study and Contemplation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Between 1966 and 1970, Tamari was based primarily in Beirut, where he worked with UNRWA to document the plight of Palestinian refugees on film. During this time, he also worked with Jordanian artist Mona Saudi on a book of drawings and interviews with Palestinian refugee children and produced cartoons and graphic design in support of the growing Palestinian liberation movement. The artist then relocated permanently to Japan, where he and his wife Kyoko raised two daughters. He spent the rest of his life in Kyoto and Tokyo as a modern-day “Renaissance man,” exploring his interests in fine arts, graphic design, physics, and industrial design.

Reflecting on his childhood in 1991, Tamari claimed that four significant influences shaped his formative years: church life, the surrounding culture of Islam, Palestinian and Arab nationalism, and “a veneer of European ‘modern’ culture and values” adopted by upper-class, educated Arabs. Tamari’s family belonged to the Eastern Orthodox Church, and their religious traditions brought him into contact with other cultures at a young age. His maternal grandmother facilitated visits to the Holy Land for Orthodox pilgrims from Russia, which is how the artist claimed to have come by his Russian, first name. From his youth, Tamari showed unusual curiosity about the world around him, and his parents encouraged his creative endeavors rather than attempting to force the boy into pursuing something more “practical.” His sister, Vera, also benefitted from this environment, becoming a successful artist, potter, curator, and historian of Islamic art.

Throughout his career as an artist, Vladimir Tamari has worked primarily in watercolor and acrylic paint, approaching both with a unique sensitivity to light and color. “As a young child,” the artist recalled, “I was fascinated with the rays of sunlight entering the gloomy attic of my home through a cracked roof tile and watched with fascination the particles of dust dancing in the light.” This interest in sunlight found its way into Tamari’s paintings, which often feature bright rays of color or areas that seem to glow with a hazy, ethereal warmth. His abstract compositions are done in a style all his own, their animated shapes and vivid colors simultaneously evoking the work of artists as diverse as Keith Haring, Georgia O’Keeffe, Mona Saudi, Etel Adnan, and Gino Severini without ever truly mirroring them. The balance of hyper-saturated pigments and gentle pastel washes that define his watercolors is almost hypnotic. Yet, the artist insisted upon their spontaneity; per his description, he did not study or “think” about color in a logical way but approached it as a primitive and instinctive mode of expression, rooted in the bright hues and clear light of his Palestinian childhood. The play of solidity and transparency that distinguishes much of his oeuvre is also related to the social climate in which he came of age. Watching Palestine scramble to adjust and react to the new Israeli regime, Tamari was inspired by the clash between his “ancient culture” and “the need for swift adjustments to absorb the shock of new values and realities.” His paintings were thus “influenced by the solidity of rocks and stones, yet tempered by a knowledge that even rocks and stones are affected by the flow of light or water.” This sensibility in his work combines “immovable solidity and ethereal transparency, a love for the tangible and the traditional combined with an irrepressible imagination and need for change.”

In addition to visual art, Tamari was an avid inventor and spent much of his time immersed in the study of physics. Of the many optical and technical devices he designed, the three-dimensional drawing instrument stands out as a testimony to the artist’s interest in bending the rules of the physical world. The “3DD,” as he called it, is a device that allows the artist to “draw in space” by moving a handle that creates two simultaneous stereoscopic views. When observed through a double-lens stereoscope, the resultant image appears “three-dimensional” to the human eye. Tamari created the first prototype of the 3DD in Jerusalem in 1964, but it was lost when his home was hit by a rocket in the 1967 war. He subsequently spent 15 years building and perfecting hundreds of models of the instrument.

Vladimir Tamari passed away in Tokyo in August 2017. Only hours earlier, he had finished his final painting, which depicted a blossoming cherry tree in a park near his home.

Sources

Kamal Boullata, Palestinian Art from 1850 to the Present, London: Saqi, 2009

Vladimir Tamari, “Influences and Motivations in the Work of a Palestinian Artist/Inventor,” Leonardo v. 24 n. 1, February 1991

Anne Mullin Burnham, “Three From Jerusalem,” Aramco World, July-August 1990

Artist’s personal website, www.vladimirtamari.com

Tania Tamari Nasir, “Vladimir Tamari,” This Week in Palestine http://thisweekinpalestine.com/vladimir-tamari/

“Artist profile: Vladimir Tamari,” Birzeit University Museum website, http://museum.birzeit.edu/artists/vladimir-tamari