Jean Kadmon – Painter  Poet  Novelist

Jean Kadmon, a painter and sculptor as well as poet and novelist, thought that her beginnings in visual art were during a short stint in the Artist Village Ein Hod near the Mediterranean in Israel. But teen age photographs turned up in an old trunk. They were made with a large ordinary Kodak camera of the “thirties” with its great lens, and printed in her own dark room with a sink. In fact, she won first prize in a photo contest in Edmonton Alberta where she lived. The prize photo happened to be of a pristine oil sand bluff and pine trees near today’s oil boom town, Ft. McMurray on the Canadian Athabaska River. In the thirties, Jean Kadmon’s father, a geologist, had tried to set up an oil-sand plant not far from the bluff. WWII put an end to his endeavors and, today, Jean Kadmon because of her marriage, too, is a writer and artist in Jerusalem, rather than a billionaire. The recent small oil paintings of a model - Nelly No. 7 and Nelly No. 8 – are made with wild coloring and lumpy surfaces specifically designed to show up well on a screen of today. However, in prints without color, the portraits are not wild but tone perfect. This might be expected of a painter who when very young, became alert to visual art as a black and white photographer…..