Jodi Reznik

so jody thank you so much and welcome to the show thank you for having me so tell us a little bit about your i guess your career how you got into art what type of art um speaks to you most give us a little bit about you okay i went to brooklyn college i actually have been drawing and painting like most artists from a very young age uh copying comic book characters and things like that got a lot of great approval for it so there's nothing like positive reinforcement to push it further uh and uh so it became a thing and then i went to brooklyn college i majored in art um also met my husband there yeah really did and then um i also went to the school of visual arts i got a master's degree wow um i adore adore artwork i adore everything about it i love the process even you know that was i always tell my kids the story about when i first met my husband and he said to me your fingers are always dirty why are your fingers always dirty i said i'm an art student if my fingers were not dirty we would have a problem with my artwork right right right right so i love the process i love being immersed in art i teach art and that gives me enormous joy um i own zelda's art world so i get to interact with a lot of artists which is also probably the best part of my day when i'm there i teach there and i teach in a girls high school i teach in yde and that's a great experience i love most forms of art i can appreciate most forms of art um i myself i kind of go back and forth i go from hyper realism to more abstract things depending on what it is it really depends on the subject matter for me um so if you if you uh look at some of my work you'll see that some of them very highly you know very highly realistic and then some of them are not so much it depends on my experience of the person and what it is i'm trying to communicate right so you know what's interesting about art now i know very little about it i i can appreciate it but i i know very little about its creation about its evolution about how it works um but what's so fascinating i want to get your take on it is that um in many ways art is a message that the artist is trying to deliver and i guess the audience either is deciphering it or can see their own message in that artwork do you find that when you approach your new artwork you have something in mind that you you you sort of figured out or saw or does it you know does it come naturally and you just like you said you just color and draw and sketch and create like just naturally you're so it's like people that love sports and are you just how does it work when how do you develop your own internal art or your your artwork so for me it usually is um something happens that moves me either i've learned something you know or i've experienced something i've met somebody um and i'm moved in some way that um that then drives me to want to share my experience of it it's it's such a great uh method of communication um because while the message is out there that you know the artist definitely includes their soul in in their artwork so you get the message you get the artist you get you know on a surface just hopefully something pleasant to look at it it covers so many bases and for me personally um the paintings that i have had the most satisfaction from are paintings that come from my you know my being inspired i've done paintings you know where people have commissioned me to do works of art that are not particularly meaningful to me i would say that to an outside looker an outside observer they're oh they're accurate they look like what they're supposed to look like um but they don't really have the soul that i would want to let's say hang in my house you know in my house and my in my my you know immediate environment i would want something that stirs me amazing do you find that people have an appreciation for jewish art that that people are looking for it i do in fact i think that unfortunately there isn't enough of it there when i when i was teaching um for example what i was teaching i teach a class called art appreciation in high school and it's a hard it's a hard subject to teach in an orthodox school because so much of what was created over the years was religious art that's not appropriate for us so one of the ways that i was that i found to circumvent that was to look for let's say during medieval the medieval period where everything was religious um i went into jewish manuscripts uh illuminated manuscripts mostly haggadahs and uh things like tehillim and shira shirin um things like that so that i was able to explain to the girls that although we were limited in some way um we didn't need to be limited you know we could still produce things that were absolutely breathtakingly beautiful what are some artwork that you think people who are just hearing this for the first time who you know this piques their interest are there places to go online is there are there specific art that you say listen you gotta google this or that is is there anything that someone could uh introduce themselves with in the world of jewish art so i'm not a really big fan of art lessons online um mainly because i think you need i think you need a teacher to to you know say to you this you did this thing you followed what i did um let me explain to you why this is not uh particularly effective i know when i was an art student i had i won't mention his name he's an extremely renowned painter his paintings are in the museum of modern art that's how real he was he was amazing he's actually still alive i understand he's 97 98 years old he's an amazing amazing amazing uh painter but he would just come he would come around and he would take your p if you would look at something that you did and he wasn't uh happy with it rather than explain to you what you were doing um mistakenly he would just take your brush fix your painting and walk away well i find that that's a lot of and that was a terrible experience obviously but i find that um you need to have that that interaction i find most learning most educating uh you really do need to have a human interaction very good very good well we we appreciate you being here appreciate what you do um is there before you go is there one painting one artwork i should say that is your favorite that you you can tell us about of mine painting of mine um yeah i so i get i sent in a painting called uh it's a painting of an old yemenite woman um it's actually my friend's grandmother uh yeah she was this i never met this woman but i met her daughter her granddaughter her great-granddaughter and her great-grand great-great-grandchildren wow which was pretty amazing yeah and um i'll tell you the reason i love it is because um it goes back to a story if you see she's very wrinkled and she's you know she's old and and and it's it shows there's an interesting story about the portraitist for queen elizabeth and he loved the queen and he did a beautiful painting of her when he showed it to the queen the queen said where are my wrinkles and he said well because i love the queen i wanted to paint her youthful and beautiful the way she was he said she and the queen said absolutely not i earned all of those wrinkles put them back in and when i look at that painting of that woman uh i didn't beautify it at all i didn't glorify it in any way this woman had been through everything so beautiful yeah she lived in yemen she went from yemen to israel she raised children she lost children she you know she really went through everything and i really wanted that to show on her face yeah because she earned it yeah very very good and she's the story of the jewish people in many ways and so exactly that's the art exactly exactly and i want everyone to look at her and and i you know she has some of the traditional things like the headdress she's wearing you know two head things um but her clothing i i left her as she was she deserves the honor of holding her head up exactly as she is yeah and it's interesting as you said i'm thinking of my grandparents i'm sure everyone's thinking of hey you know what my grandmother great mother whoever ate mother wherever you are in that totem pole um that generation of people that i think you've painted her in um everyone's thinking yeah that's not only the story of our people story of my own family so it's such a it has such a deep meaning um and i can see now when you when someone sees that painting they not only see her but they see themselves maybe you see an entire history in this woman yeah yeah beautiful well thank you so much for joining us on the show it's such an honor to to meet you and we thank you for what you do how do we find your works what what how do we go on and find your works are they online somewhere that we can look at them how do we get them online but i would answer anybody's request um to see any of my lot work if they were thinking about either a purchase or you know by the way um i do also offer people and i don't do this for money uh you know uh people that are painters that have issues with their painting or hit road bumps in their painting i'm painting for decades um i probably i've probably encountered every problem that you could possibly imagine um but anybody could um reach me uh through email and if they have a specific question that they need help with uh uh artwork that they're doing i'm happy to help um or else they can contact me um at my store i own zelda's art world on nostrand avenue uh so they can call and leave a message for me there i always respond what's your email address so it's jody jodi at zelda's artworld.com amazing thank you so much my pleasure appreciate you being here my pleasure thank you very much for having me thanks so much for watching for more content like and subscribe and be sure to tune in live every thursday at 8 pm eastern at the shabacho.com or right here on youtube