Friday 14 February 2014

Soshana Afroyim




Soshana Afroyim's drawings were informed from her late childhood; when she was eleven her family fled Austria due to Hitler’s invasion. They fled to Switzerland, Paris and then London where she had painting and drawing lessons. During this time there was bombing over London so every night Afroyim and her family sat in bomb shelters and this made her very stressed, and this was then expressed through a series of drawings. In 1941 Afroyim arrived at Ellis Island with her mother after her father had arrived earlier in the year. At the age of seventeen she travelled around America with her family and began to draw and paint what she saw.
Several years later Afroyim went back to Vienna and then she travelled the world and was inspired by what she saw. A lot of her work has a lonely figure that is surrounded by heavy brush strokes which indicates bars and being trapped. Afroyim paints and draws from the experiences that she had encountered from travelling and also her childhood.
Afroyim's paintings contain meaning and draw on the emotions of the viewer. I like the use of bold and soft brush strokes especially when she paints faces and prison bars.

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