I can't remember a time when I wasn't in love with Hassan Massoudy’s work. His calligraphy manages to be both relatively legible and extremely expressive. I appreciate that more than anything.

My last violin teacher, Micha Molthoff, made me imitate great violinists. When studying with him, I would play along with old recordings, dozens of times, hundreds of times, thousands of times, trying to “paste” my sound to the sound of the recording, trying to feel what the old masters had felt when recording, becoming one with them. “Worst case scenario”, Micha would say with a wink, “you will become a perfect copy of this or the other great violinist. I can think of worse fates…”. But of course, what happened, time and again, is that I would dive into the sound of someone, breathe through his playing for a moth or two, and then move on to the next one, having tasted true intimacy with someone who had died decades before. In the end, my playing was enriched by a flavour I had previously known only passively, only from recordings I would listen to.

Translating the same idea, the same practice, to calligraphy, I started copying Hassan Massoudy’s work as well. Of course, I did this in the privacy of my own studio. Copying somebody else's work is not art. It's practice. But during that practice, another person entered. HaRav Kook, an early 20th century Rabbi I was in love it, at the time, started being in my thoughts when copying Hassan Massoudy’s work. Not having met either of them, these two people started talking to each other, in my mind. Both showed me and each other the same mixture of softness of content and harshness of form. All three of us were immigrants and were very much formed by our immigration stories. 

And so, at the end of my practice, I drew 5 pieces, each of them quoting both men. One verbally and one in style.