Alan Kaufman’s Artist Statement

I was born in New York City to a French Jewish Holocaust survivor, Marie, and after living for many years in Israel, I now hold three citizenships: Israeli, French and American. From early on, she imbued me with a taste for the European. Before ever picking up a brush to paint, I spent many years in studying painters and art history. Painting is, for me, a spiritual action directly linked to my personal history. My mother instilled in me a love of art and literature. She drew beautifully and taught me how to make portraits with pencil or pen on the back of the cardboard inserted into shirts returned from the laundry. But I did not come to actually paint until quite late, and only once I had made my mark as a writer. It was as though I needed to achieve in one area in order to be free to begin to create in the other.

My artistic influences are, decidedly, Max Beckman, Francis Bacon, Mark Rothko, Otto Dix, R.B. Kitaj, Wilhelm DeKooning and a local painter whom I very much admire and regard as my most important painting colleague, David Newman. It is Newman who gave me the courage to paint and who taught me much of what I know about technique.

As the son of a Holocaust survivor I carry within me a world of six million forgotten faces and each time I paint a portrait I like to think that I can invest the eyes and mood of the figure with that of someone who perished.

Alan Kaufman's novel Matches was published by Little, Brown and Company in the Fall of 2005. David Mamet has called Matches "an extraordinary war novel," and Dave Eggers has written that "there is more passion here then you see in twenty other books combined." Kaufman's critically-acclaimed memoir, Jew Boy (Fromm/Farrar,Strauss, Giroux), has appeared in three editions, hardcover and paperback, in the United States and Great Britain. He is the award-winning editor of several anthologies, the most recent of which, The Outlaw Bible of American Literature, was recently reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. He has taught in the graduate and undergraduate schools of the Academy of Art University and in writing workshops in San Francisco. His work has appeared in Salon, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Partisan Review and The San Francisco Examiner. Kaufman has been widely anthologized, most recently in Nothing Makes You Free: Writings From Descendents of Holocaust Survivors (WW Norton).