“The beginning of a picture is very important,” said the painter Dora Holzhandler, who has died aged 87. “You have to be in quite a meditative state. It’s magical. When I paint something I’ve seen 50 years ago, it’s the same moment re-created. The moment is the truth.”
Such mystical intimacy characterises her oils of naked lovers embracing in psychedelically patterned rooms; darkly flourishing gouaches of icon-like mothers and children, or rabbis meditating; and free and luminous watercolours of, say, a skateboarding teenager or a woman sweeping a floor. The art critic Sister Wendy Beckett, a close friend in later years, called Dora “an artist with a beautiful secret ... that makes all things luminous ... a precious gift in this confused and violent world”.
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