A mountain is not just a mountain when seen through the stylized gaze of Sveta Esser. A hillside, a house, the most ordinary things in the world take on a magical, ethereal, quality that cannot be duplicated. Embracing Esser’s art is like stepping into another world, where, thankfully, someone has already opened the door for us.

Esser’s paintings magnify all the natural colors of the countryside and distills them down to their very essence. The strong primal colors of her minimalist landscapes capture the contrasts of the natural scenery in Israel and Europe, from Germany to Tuscany, radiating the warmth of the land, its fragrances and its unadulterated topography.

Esser says of her work, “The colorfulness of the countryside, the flowers that never stop blooming, and the sunshine all influence my paintings and the colors I decide to use.” Within her work that she creates only with a palette knife, one can detect the influence of Cézanne, himself a palette knife artist, particularly from his later body of work painted in the South of France with its controlled subtle surfaces and increasing use of primary colors, their division and related tones. Esser’s use of color and color tone is a dominant sensation and means of expression in her work, where color temperature corresponds to a mood of both the physical world and the painting.

Working with her palette knife, Esser mixes her colors before she puts them on the canvas. And, depending on the light she is capturing in an individual painting will use oil or acrylic. Using old techniques, her works are nevertheless a symphony of contemporary colors. The moment she starts work on a painting she is lost in its substance. She says, “It doesn’t matter what’s going on around me, I’m so immersed in my work that I don’t hear anything—I’m in my own world.”