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January 21, 2005/Shevat 11 5765, Vol. 57, No. 21
Local artists make marriages beautiful
RAEANNE MARSH
Special to Jewish News
Like every bride- or groom-to-be, you want everything perfect and uniquely yours for the big day, from the wedding dress to the weather and all the elements in between. You may also want a wedding experience that's not only uniquely yours, but celebrates the cultural richness of your Jewish heritage. Fortunately, a number of Valley artists devote themselves to creating beautiful wedding items to enhance any nuptial celebration.
A ketubah is the couple's story
For Lisa Chaikin, becoming a ketubah artist gave her an artistic outlet in which to combine calligraphy and her love of fine art in a meaningful way. "Being both Jewish and an artist, I was drawn to ketubah making," she says. But it actually started at the suggestion of her rabbi, Rabbi Michael Berk, at the temple she belonged to in Santa Monica, Calif.
Started 20 years ago, Chaikin's Paintdreams is still a love today. "What I like about my work is the joy it brings the couple," she says. Often, the ketubah is displayed at the wedding.
"Anything goes when it comes to people's imagination," Chaikin says. She believes a ketubah is more than a wedding contract; it is the couple's story.
One couple had spent a lot of time walking on the beach when they were dating. Chaikin created for their ketubah a beach scene, complete with pelican, the tide coming in, and fish in the water. Another couple, married on an LA rooftop at daybreak, also spent time at the ocean - in it, in fact, as scuba divers. Their ketubah shows them coming out of the water holding an octopus.
Then there was the couple, both lawyers, who had written their own contract. Part of the contract was in Hebrew, but "the English part was so huge I didn't think I could fit it all on." Chaikin remembers having to ask them to edit it down. "They both laughed and said, 'I knew we shouldn't have put that in.'"
When a couple contacts her, she interviews them about themselves and then creates a personalized ketubah based on their story. If local, she'll meet with them in person; if long-distance, she'll talk with them by phone. "Nothing pleases me more than making a ketubah that uniquely reflects the couple that comes to me," Chaikin shares. But a recent opportunity certainly ranks right up there: Chaikin was approached by the curator of the Jewish Museum of Vienna (JÅdisches Museum der Stadt Wien) to have her ketubah be part of a show this spring on Jewish tradition.
Chaikin has always been interested in fine art. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design for Illustration and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Later, she was exposed to someone who taught Hebrew calligraphy. "I joined it with my English calligraphy and then with fine arts, and all of a sudden it all came together."
The chuppah doesn't have to be standard
Ellen Lerman recalls being a little bit surprised when her elder son, David, asked her to sew the chuppah for his upcoming wedding. "After a little thought, I said, 'Of course.'" And thus began Chai Chuppah.
"I've always sewed various things," she explains. Her grandfather, a tailor, taught her to use a sewing machine, and her grandmother, an able craftswoman, taught her to hand stitch. On top of that, during the training for her degree in occupational therapy she learned a lot of crafts.
Pleased to honor her son's and future daughter-in-law's wishes, she then had to figure out how to do it. The size on which she ultimately decided (4 feet by 6 feet) has now become her standard, and on the single piece of fabric she creates scenes meaningful for the bridal couple.
The theme for this first one was tikkun olam. Repairing the world was an important idea to Melissa, a social worker, and David, who worked with atypical students in a program at University of Virginia. Using hand-embroidery and appliqué, Lerman embellished the chuppah with a globe of the world, the couple's names - including Melissa's maiden name - the date and the city where the nuptials took place. In recognition of the chuppah's origin as a tallit, she added a blue stripe along the two sides.
Word of mouth has grown her business from that start in 2001. "I like making the couple happy," says Lerman, who talks with the couple to find what is most meaningful to them. Often the chuppah becomes an heirloom. "People say, 'Leave space on that chuppah because I'll want my children's names on it when they use it.'"
One family asked her to create a chuppah by combining the tallitot of the bridal couple and those of the children each had from a previous marriage. With the tallitot basted together so they could be separated again after the ceremony, the chuppah was a symbolic weaving together of the family.
Lerman's creative approach to chuppah design is influenced at least in part by her own experience: For her wedding, her mother created a chuppah of flowers on floral netting. "I remembered you don't have to do anything that was standard."
The chuppah for the wedding of her second son, Jeff, combined images taken from his trek on the Appalachian trail with views from the home where his bride, Heather, had grown up - along with the appliquÄd shape of their dog's little white ears.
Hebrew letters take shape as cards
Hebrew letters spill in a controlled flow on the Marla's Inkwell series of greeting cards. Inspired by a class she took in Hebrew calligraphy at the Valley of the Sun Jewish Community Center in 1996, Marla Levine uses a technique called micrography to make shapes out of a concentrated mesh of miniscule Hebrew letters. For instance, one card shows a champagne bottle whose volume is filled with randomly chosen, individually drawn Hebrew letters, and the spill issuing from its mouth is a flowing shape that, upon close inspection, is seen to be made up solely of more Hebrew letters.
Mostly self-taught by the tried and true "trial and error" method, Levine says her drawings allow her to "combine my love of Judaism with artwork."
Of the technique itself, Levine says, "I like the spontaneity of making letters fly and take on a life of their own." But the drawings are anything but spontaneous to create. It took her 22 hours to hand-draw the "Cheers" champagne picture. "A lot of trial and error went into filling the shape and making it look recognizable, and to making (the spill) look flowing."
Not every shape is formed of Hebrew letters. Levine combines the micrography with stippling, a technique in which the shape is created by tiny dots, tightly spaced for dark and shaded areas and wider apart for the lighter areas.
Levine's current line is 12 cards, one of them a wedding greeting. The image was inspired by her own wedding photo, but then "I took artistic license." The flowers of the chuppah are random Hebrew letters, but the letters that make up the posts are very specific - they spell Ani L'Dodi V'Dodi Li (I am my beloved's...).
Beneath the chuppah, of course, are the bride and groom. Levine had been working on the bride's figure for some time, she recalls, with her husband regularly looking over her shoulder and asking, "Isn't there going to be a groom there?" So finally she drew in the single micrography portion of the groom's figure - and the yarmulke just floated there until she finished the bride "so he'd know something was coming."
There are many steps to the finished picture, and Levine keeps copies of the different stages so she can remember how it all came together. All is hand-done except the final stage - she takes her black-and-white ink drawing and, using the computer, separates it into two colors.
Once she has written the greeting for inside the card, she's ready to take the artwork to the printer. The cards are all two-color - plum and burnt orange - which she's found to work well for the different objects and scenes of her cards.
Levine has built her business by mailing samples to temples in selected areas across the country that she feels have a strong Jewish population, and she is happy to do the same for individuals who contact her. What she likes best about her business is creating the art and hearing the reactions of people "expressing how they feel about the art when they see it."
Colorful ketubot are true to the couple's history
Geula Simon may spend 20 or more hours carefully inking the Hebrew onto parchment paper for a couple's ketubah. "I love to do it," she says, so the time passes and "I don't realize how many hours I work."
Born in Morocco, Simon studied art and education at Haifa University in Israel. She taught art in Israel, but when she immigrated to the U.S. 20 years ago, she found more opportunity to teach Hebrew than art. While she has been writing ketubot for more then 15 years, it is only in the last two that she has seriously promoted it as a business - Geula Art.
The first ketubah Simon scribed was done at the behest of a fellow teacher at the Phoenix Hebrew University, who knew about Simon's art background and asked her to do a ketubah for her parents' anniversary. Now Simon has samples of ketubot from which couples can choose, but "I never do it completely the same twice."
And there are differences that must be accommodated in the text for different life histories. Details that are important, Simon explains, include whether the bride is a widow or divorcÄe and from what tribe the groom descends. She asks each couple to fill out a form, and in some cases will verify information with the rabbi.
Simon describes the letter shapes as done in "biblical style writing." Once the text is finished, she embellishes the borders with the design chosen by the couple. She's found that most grooms like the Mogen David with symbols of the different tribes inside the star. "The designs are colorful," she says, adding, "The customers tell me what colors they like."
The most unusual ketubah she has prepared was for a couple who both were lawyers. "They wrote their own ketubah in English, and took it to a rabbi to translate into Hebrew." The border design was the Mogen David, but filled with symbols of their own choosing. Says Simon, "It was interesting to work on that - something not traditional."
Hand-drawn calligraphy enhances invitations and ketubot
Domenica Corbo's career in calligraphy began when she decided, in her second year of medical school, that being a surgeon was not what she wanted after all, and she fell back to what had been a hobby for her since the age of 6 or 7. She founded Calligraphy by Domenica almost 20 years ago, and has seen it grow by word of mouth.
Corbo started with envelopes and invitations and now also does ketubot. She offers 38 different letter styles and is always on the lookout for new styles, but finds the same six or seven are chosen the majority of the time. Her own favorite is Chancery Cursive - what most of us call Italic.
"Legibility is the main factor," she says. "You don't want it too swirly, because if you can't read what's written, you've defeated the purpose." Also, she says, "If you don't draw what's correct, the rabbis will tell you." So she always does a rough draft before drawing the ketubah, which may be written over a $3,000 watercolor or a $500 lithograph.
"You can see the variation when the ketubah is done by hand," says Corbo, pointing out, "In the computer age, there aren't a lot of things done by hand any more." She carefully spaces the letters on each line so the lines of text are equal in length and the document blocks out neatly; words may not be the same exact size from one line to the next. Spacing is equally important with a lithograph, filling in the spaces so it looks like the ketubah was done all at once.
Corbo will also decorate the ketubah. She remembers one couple who wanted all parts of the world represented on their ketubah, starting with the ocean at the bottom of the page and moving up the sides to the stars and sun at the top. In the ocean, they wanted a crab, partly because it was the bride's astrological sign, and that led to many comments on the crab not being kosher. Corbo had to point out, "They're not eating the ketubah."
One challenge in addressing wedding invitation envelopes is matching the color already printed for the return address. "There are hundreds of colors." Corbo uses gouaches (watercolors in tubes), mixing, perhaps, "a little bit silver, a little brown ... there may be five components." And she loves to draw face covers for the wedding programs.
But some of her most memorable projects were not for weddings. "I drew the certificate for (Britain's Prime Minister) Tony Blair when Fender Guitar sent him a custom guitar as a 'thank you' for his 9/11 help." And when Temple Solel redesigned its synagogue, the Hebrew calligraphy she drew was given to a glass worker who etched it into the glass.
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