About
Thea Shmueli is a multidisciplinary artist who makes something from nothing, out of curiosity and exploration across many materials. Self-taught, she learns through movement, experiment and wonder. Her path spans more than three decades of making, including iron forging and jewellery design.
“Mother to Daniel, my source of inspiration for change and growth.”
The paintings, and the subjects that pass through me, deal with choice and consent, with the freedom to live and to be. I paint movement, emotion, change — where the destination of the creative journey is the journey itself, a journey in which the experience takes shape in motion.
Art is not only for looking at; it is an invitation to self-exploration. Every work holds the potential to affect and to give meaning. The power of art is like sowing love in fertile soil.
Draft translation from the Hebrew — to confirm
On Defying Symmetry
My movement with drawing began on 1 January 2022, following a black-and-white pattern that caught my attention. Winter, up north, with the heater and a sketchbook I had bought — not really knowing what was coming, looking for a new movement.
A few days later, sitting the same way, my son Daniel walked past, looked at me and at the drawing, and put into words what I had not yet understood: “Doesn’t it bother you that it isn’t symmetrical?” I raised my head and smiled at him. I told him how well he knows me, and that he had named the struggle I was having between the hand holding the pen and the head — the struggle with symmetry. I had no idea that question would change something in me, set me free, and send me out to search and to look again.
Two months later I moved to painting on cardboard. The choice was spontaneous, part of the same consent to step out of symmetry, out of perfection, and to give myself to whatever asks to be born through me. In the building’s shelter lay a broken, torn cardboard panel; something in the size and texture of wounded cardboard drew me in. For the first time I approached a work without striving for realism or “perfection”, guided only by the emotion and harmony being woven on the cardboard. There was not really a choice; it all happened spontaneously — a working-through of emotions, of love.
“Courage” and “Harmonic Asymmetry” were made side by side. “Harmonic Asymmetry” leaned against the studio door with “Courage” beside it — and in that moment I saw all the paintings not yet painted, one beside the other. And painting was born after painting. As if they asked me to be revealed; today they ask to be seen.
Writing these words, it became clear to me that I had painted realism in emotions.
Exhibitions and events
- Defying Symmetry — solo exhibition, Herzliya municipal gallerydetails and year to confirm
- Ebb and Flow — group exhibition, Petah Tikvadetails and year to confirm
- Love Alongside Pain — open studio, Art Freedomdetails and year to confirm
- Herzliya Home&Art — open studiosdetails and year to confirm