If only all layovers could be this profound.
Rita Sklar’s artistic career took a serendipitous turn when she and her husband visited the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt during a 10-hour layover en route to a vacation in Namibia.
Before her at the museum was a list of Frankfurt residents who died in the Holocaust. And among those was her grandfather’s name, Solomon Wald.
Seeing his name emblazoned on the wall, she began mourning a man she never met. She painted his portrait onto a map of Frankfurt when she returned to her Oakland home. She describes the creation of “Grandpa Solomon-Holocaust Victim” as a healing process.
Sklar, who has been a professional artist for 11 years, enjoyed painting on top of maps and quickly expanded her subject matter to include wildlife and nature scenes.
Her second piece was of the endangered African elephant, the largest living land animal, painted on a map of Namibia. “I wanted to depict the dichotomy of both the beauty and the endangerment of this animal.”
“Tikkun olam is an important driving force in my concern for the environment,” said Sklar who is in a spiritual direction group at Kehilla Community Synagogue in Piedmont.
That painting and more are part of Sklar’s exhibit “Vanishing Species and More,” a collection of watercolor paintings transposed onto maps from around the world. Also on display at the Joseph P. Bort Metro Center in Oakland is the work of another Jewish artist, Toby Tover-Krein.
While Sklar creates her art on maps from around the world, Tover-Krein scours the world’s streets, gutters and sidewalks for her artistic materials.
The bustling café on the bottom level of the MetroCenter is home to Tover-Krein’s mixed media paintings, “Transformations, A New Life for Recycled and Found Objects”
She sees art in objects most people sidestep: cardboard, pieces of asphalt, window screens. She drags trash home with her and uses it in her paintings. “I realized I could make beautiful art out of a lot of the things people throw away.”
After taking a U.C. Berkeley mixed-media art class, she was thrust into a completely new medium. She compares tapping into a new talent she didn’t know she possessed to having a spiritual awakening.
“Finding this art was a type of genesis for me,” said Tover-Krein of Pleasant Hill. “God gave me this gift.”
Two pieces in the exhibit pay homage to her artistic renaissance.
“In the Beginning” is a series of six paintings, each one named after one of the days of creation. The painting is composed of wood scraps, sawdust, broken dental models, piano hammers and other found materials.
“Genesis I” is in keeping with this theme and is also made with found materials — painted and sealed to the canvas with acrylic paint.
Tover-Krein’s concern for the environment fuels her choice of this medium. During her extensive travels to Third World countries, she noticed the difference between the quantity of waste produced there versus at home.
“Consumerism in this country is built on planned obsolescence,” she said. “People are encouraged to discard everything and not make anything precious.”
“I’m using art as a vehicle to raise awareness,” she said. “This world isn’t going to last forever.”
“Transformations: A New Life for Recycled and Found Objects” by Toby Tover-Krein and “Vanishing Species and More” by Rita Sklar are on exhibit at the Joseph P. Bort MetroCenter, 101 Eighth St., Oakland. (510) 464-7700.