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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/23457/full/23457/art-ahoy/ <br /><br /> <b>Art ahoy!</b> <br /> Friday, August 20, 2004 | by <p>joe eskenazi </p> <br /><br /><p>Beth Grossman has yet to meet a person who couldn’t take a paintbrush and transform a blank canvas.<br /><br /> “I tell them how I can’t stand the look of a plain white piece of paper. I ask them to make a mark on the paper, cover it with color,” said the Brisbane artist and art instructor. <br /><br /> “Change it in some way so it’s not a perfect piece of white paper looking back at you.” <br /><br /> Grossman had her share of coaxing to do on her latest artistic endeavor, a cruise down the Volga River for Jewish women from both America and the former Soviet Union, put on by the charitable organization Project Kesher. The Illinois-based nonprofit aims to foster relationships between Jewish women from the former Soviet Union and elsewhere. <br /><br /> After full days of workshops on everything from business management to remedial Judaism, participants trudged into Grossman’s workshop for some catharsis on the canvas. <br /><br /> Everyone painted, Grossman noted, but American women apparently complained more. <br /><br /> “The former Soviet Union women were generally very excited about the possibility; they got there and said, ‘All right, let’s work,’” recalled Grossman. “American women tended to kvetch, ‘I can’t draw a straight line.’ I said, ‘Great. You don’t have to.’” <br /><br /> Instead, Grossman wanted the women to create works of art that symbolized their family histories and their Judaism, straight lines or no. <br /><br /> “One of the ones that moved me the most was when one woman made a beautiful sunrise picture, and, on the back, wrote ‘First tefillin service ever,’” she said. <br /><br /> “To her, it was more beautiful than the rising sun.”<br /><br /> In one memorable session, a late-night burst of energy kept Grossman’s students up painting until 1:30 in the morning. The work produced on the boat will be kept in a decorated box Grossman will create and, she hopes, exhibited throughout the nation.  <br /><br /> “It was a very tight room surrounded by glass and the scenery of the Volga kept moving by as we were working,” she recalled.<br /><br /> “We were kind of kibitzing as people kept their hands moving and sharing stories. [The room was] really full of spirit and energy.”<br /><br /> In between art sessions, the boat landed at several stops along the Volga to check up on past Project Kesher enterprises. Among them were a garden nursery and computer learning center started by several Jewish women via a Kesher “micro-loan,” and meetings with some of the 165 women’s groups established in the last decade. <br /><br /> “What those women can do with a couple of thousand dollars under the extreme situation they live in, which <br /><br /> is constantly evolving and changing, is really humbling,” said Grossman. <br /><br /> She views the works created by the 90 or more participants as “histories,” a way to record the impact Jewish women have had on post-Soviet society. <br /><br /> “I wanted to give each woman a sense that her story was crucial to making up the history we were creating. And we do create [history] as Jewish women in the world. I got a really clear picture of the role women in the former Soviet Union are playing in creating a civil society there,” she said. <br /><br /> “And if they don’t write their own stories, their own history, no one else is going to.”</p> <p> </p>

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