Not a Day Goes By

To see the original handmade version, please click here

The creation of Not a Day Goes By was triggered by an encounter with a homeless man who’d just soiled himself in the centre of Madrid, a city I’ve lived in for the past five years. The book depicts the body in public spaces and the shame and disgust we attribute to its natural functions when they become visible outside their acceptable, hidden sphere: the privacy of one’s own home.

Forty years ago, while still serving in the Israeli military, I, too, had shat myself on separate occasions in public spaces. Since then, I have lived with the dread of a reoccurrence, the times it almost happened again, along with the memory of the start of my PTSD during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in the early 1980s. The encounter with the man who’d soiled himself sent me back to the graphic nature of living with a chronic bowel condition and the challenge of depicting the dread, shame and isolation through colour, abstraction and surrealist imagery.

I turned to other artists for guidance and company, and the images in the book make references to the work of Max Beckman, Chris Ofili, Philip Guston, Barbara Rossi, and George Condo. Trauma is deeply linked to isolation, to the feeling of aloneness when faced with an extreme situation, and through this conversation with artists who use vibrant colour palettes and who are interested in telling complex stories through their work, I felt able to depict the psychological and physical reality of living with a chronic PTSD-related condition.

The original artist’s book can be seen here.