[Gome Alon](https://www.cohart.com/gome.alon/profile) is a freelance animator, designer and multidisciplinary artist born and raised in Haifa, currently based in NYC.

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#### Tell us about your artistic journey

I grew up in a small house, the middle child in a family of seven kids. My mother is an art teacher and my father is an architect, so there were always pencils and blank pages around. As I got a bit older, I would draw in the streets with friends — we were part of a larger movement of artists looking for “available” walls around the city to paint on.

Later on, I got into graphic design, mainly designing posters for parties and concerts. Most of my friends and siblings were also involved in art in some way, and when I felt it was time to take things more seriously, I decided to pursue a BFA in animation.

During my studies, I worked with Ghostown, a studio run by Broken Fingaz, and was lucky to be part of some big projects — including music videos for U2 and large-scale murals around the world. 

Two years ago, after years of working with walls and screens, I moved to New York and started painting with oil pastels — a medium that feels both raw and familiar, deeply tied to the act of drawing I grew up with.



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#### What first drew you to making art?

At each age, it was something different. As a kid, drawing was a great way to keep myself busy in school. Later, I attended my mom’s drawing classes. At the time, I didn’t really enjoy them, but looking back, I realize how much I learned there — especially the freedom to explore and trust my instincts.

As a teenager, I discovered a drawing teacher in my city — a sort of old-school Russian master. I started taking private lessons and was excited by his practical approach. Suddenly, the lessons had topics: perspective, proportion, anatomy, etc.

It was very different from my mother’s “natural” and open-ended approach — she never interfered with her students’ drawings. In contrast, Gennady, the teacher, would erase and correct my sketches without hesitation.

I liked receiving universal technical tools for a world I had, until then, perceived as personal and purely creative — and that drew me in.




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#### What inspires your work and where do you find your ideas?

I really like old ads, posters, book covers, and I have an obsession with old street signs — I keep taking photos of them.

In recent years, I’ve mostly painted still life, and in that context, there’s no greater inspiration than Giorgio Morandi — a painter who, in my view, reached the highest level of understanding in the arrangement of objects in space. His paintings hold both quiet and drama at once.

He spent decades with just a few simple objects, painting the same things over and over with small changes, constantly refining. Through incredible use of color, tonality, and composition, he achieved deeply moving results.

Every time I worry that my paintings might be "too simple," I look at his work and remember how much can be achieved with so little. Luckily, in New York, there’s almost always one of his works hanging in a museum or gallery somewhere.


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#### What makes your artistic approach unique?

I think people often see something different in my work than I do, and that always surprises me.

As for my approach, I don’t try to make it “unique” — I just make sure I’m always interested. Even after a hundred paintings of bananas and canned goods, I want to be sure the current piece excites me, that something about it sparks curiosity, maybe even emotion.

When it really clicks, there’s even a small sense of anxiety — suddenly, a mistake or experiment has become something “successful” that I want to preserve rather than ruin. That edge is where the thrill lies.

One thing I do know: I’m drawn to naïve, messy, simple things — things that aren’t necessarily “correct,” and therefore, hopefully, have more character by capturing some of their essence.

I constantly have to fight my own tendency to draw things properly, and that struggle shapes my artistic approach.


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#### What does a typical day in your studio look like?


I don’t paint every day. Some days I do digital animation, illustration, or just ride my bike around the city.

On painting days, a big part of the process is arranging objects on the table in a compelling way. I have many scavenged items at home, but often I return to the same familiar group — fruits, flowers, bottles, jars, pitchers, canned goods, books.

Once I’m mostly satisfied with the composition, I question whether my point of view is the most interesting angle to paint from — or whether I should change it mid-painting.
The next step is a few small, quick sketches and experiments with different color schemes. Often, over entire days, my paintings don’t work out and go straight into the trash, so on a “good” day, I try to paint as much as possible.

Then, at the end of a typical day, I cook dinner and drink a beer with my wife.


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#### How has your artistic voice evolved since you started creating?



Following the previous question — you can often see a process of simplification in artists as they age. I, too, used to work with thin pens, trying to make very precise ink drawings — both in terms of form and rendering.

Today, maybe I’m only halfway through the shift, but my work has clearly changed — I now work on rough paper with texture, the kind that “gets in the way” of making perfect lines, and I use thick, unpredictable pastel sticks.

Pastel is surprising — a line can shift from thin to wide instantly, and **each time you use it, you have to relearn how to let go**. In the middle of the process, it can be frustrating, but in the end, I always remember why it’s the right medium for me right now: because it forces me to avoid overworking and obsessing over unnecessary detail, and because the color palette is limited.



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#### What role does experimentation play in your practice?




A big part. After a period of focusing on a certain subject, approach, or technique, I always hit a wall — a kind of burnout that peaks in the awful feeling that I’ve started developing mannerisms. That’s when experimentation saves me. The method is to stop creating and start playing. That means taking hours or days — or however long it takes — to just do senseless things. Intuitive and non-intuitive, small, large, quick, and freeing. It’s not easy to take “results” out of the equation, but once that happens, your focus returns to the act of creation itself. And then, like magic, a new and compelling path always emerges — one that slowly evolves and matures. And the cycle repeats.


#### How does your cultural background or life experiences influence your work?

I come from a coastal city called Haifa. It’s Israel’s third-largest city and is known for its coexistence. Before moving to New York, I lived in a neighborhood with a predominantly Arab population.

I’ve always been politically and socially aware — at 13, I used to volunteer for the most left-leaning Israeli party, and later on, I did a year of volunteer community service and refused to join the military.

The biggest shock I experienced related to my background was October 7th — days of horror when my entire country was in shock, fear, and grief. Those days were truly terrible, but very quickly that fear shifted into dread about how my government would respond to the attack. 

And indeed, the response came — ongoing, disproportionate, inhumane, illegal, and horrifying. 

I’m not a politician, but as someone from Israel, I don’t have the privilege of staying silent — I feel compelled to speak out strongly against our terrible government, but I don’t want my art to be a part of this mess.

In terms of creating, after those first paralyzing first months, I buried myself in the act of painting for long stretches — hours that allowed me to take a break from the horror outside and, for brief moments, focus on cheerful colors and calming imagery.

While I’m a political person, I’m not a political artist, so this reality doesn’t figure into my art. But I see painting as a therapeutic and healing practice — a means of emotional survival; insisting on creation in times of destruction.


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####  What's the most challenging part of being an artist?
One of the hardest things for me is believing I’m good at what I do. It’s not uncommon for me to lose all confidence in myself and my work, falling into a kind of pit of self-doubt. Without other artists around me (I work alone), it’s easy to give in to the belief that what I am doing is irrelevant — a harsh, unproductive form of self-critique.

Of course, you have to resist that. What helps in those moments is getting feedback from people whose opinions I trust.

Another challenge is maintaining discipline. While I love to paint and can focus for long hours, the real challenge is doing it every day — without exception.


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####  What do you hope people feel or think when they see your work?

I like to believe that some people appreciate the things I appreciate in my paintings — and feel the same excitement over seemingly simple things, like the drama of a shadow falling from bananas or a glass bottle onto a diagonally well-placed book. That a contour line might feel playful rather than pretentious, and that certain brand references evoke a sense of familiarity rather than alienation.

I’m happy to hear that people feel a certain calm when looking at my work. But of course, I don’t expect anything specific from anyone, and it’s always interesting to hear what people notice — often their responses reveal things I hadn’t even seen in my own work.



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#### What advice would you give to someone just starting their artistic journey?


As an artist, it’s incredibly rewarding when people start recognizing your work without knowing it’s yours. I think that’s a pure moment of self-expression — when an artist develops a clear voice and becomes associated with a particular style, image, color palette, or line quality. If we see a painting by Philip Guston—even one we don’t know — we can often immediately tell it’s his: his specific shades of pink and red, the thick, friendly lines, recurring motifs, the way he arranges figures and imagery on the canvas.

In that spirit, my advice is not to get too attached to habits — keep taking risks and trying new things. Your voice will find you, and your audience will be able to define you without you needing to limit yourself. In other words — no fear.



#### What excites you most about where your art is headed?



In the past few months, I’ve had a bit of a breakthrough on Instagram thanks to a series of animations I started making out of curiosity — a natural merging of my love for painting and animation. These are pastel drawings of still life subjects, which I rotate and redraw again and again until I have enough images to create a relatively smooth loop animation. It’s nice to feel seen, and I like to think that if I can reach enough people, I’ll be able to do less of everything else and focus more on painting.

The thought of one day becoming a full-time painter with a studio in New York excites me — a studio life with regular visits from friends, and an exhibition or two a year — that sounds like a plan I’d happily sign up for.

As for the near future — I recently received a grant for a residency in Taiwan, a place I’ve never visited, and I’m very excited to go.


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From Haifa to New York, Gome Alon transforms simple objects into vivid oil pastel still lifes full of character

Spotlight: Gome Alon on Capturing the Essence of Everyday Objects

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