Rioritas HandMade Jewelry

ART GLASS

When I first came to Ein Carmel to open my Handmade jewelry workshop there, one of the first artists who greeted me and introduced herself was the slim and pretty Shlomit Eisenstein, who owns a large  art glass blowing workshop across the lawn. The art glass statues she created are astounding! Here you will view some of them:

S H L O M I T    E I S E N S T E I N

Shlomit R. Eisenstein creates hand blown art glass vessels and multi blown element sculptures.
Shlomit Eisenstein was educated in the social sciences receiving a MA degree from Tel Aviv University in 1984. After a twelve year career in education, she discovered the fascinating world of glass blowing when visiting an exhibition of Dale Chihuly’s work at the Minnesota Institute of Art. This turned out to be a major turning point in her life leading her to study the art  glass blowing with Bob Toensing in Anoka Minnesota during the years 1997 – 1998.
In 1999 she returned to live in Israel where only minor art glass blowing activities took place as no tradition has ever developed for this art form. The burning passion to continue the glass artistry forced Shlomit to establish her own workshop, which is housed within the artist colony at Kibbutz Ein – Carmel, south of Haifa, and was inaugurated in October 2000. The art glass workshop, which is primarily dedicated to artistic creation, also serves 6for teaching purposes and hosts guest artists.
The art glass workshop operates nine months per year while the hot Israeli summers are used by Shlomit to further her education and glass blowing skills abroad.
In the summer of 2001 Shlomit returned to the US to study specialized techniques with Ed Schmidt in Bellingham Washington.
In the summer of 2004, she was hosted at the Leerdam Glass Center in the Netherlands where she studied with the Dutch master glass blower Henk Verweij.
In the summer of 2006, she studied hot glass casting at the Glass Furnace school near Istanbul with Mitchell Gaudet
 Her work can be seen at prestigious galleries all over the country as well as in her art glass workshop.
 Shlomit Eisenstein resides in Haifa with her husband Gadi and daughters Tayir and Hodd.

 

art glass by Shlomit

art glass

glass ornament

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Contact Information:
Shlomit Eisenstein

Artist Colony Kibbutz Ein – Carmel

Kibbutz Ein – Carmel is located on route # 4,  north of Furedis and south of Oren interchange.

Tel.  +972 (0) 52-2618015

E-mail shlomit@shlomitglassblowing.com

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R O N I    D O R O N 

A new neigbour to my handmade jewelry workshop is an amazing  unique  artist - RONI DORON.

Roni Doron  creates light objects from various utensils, old Aluminium pots and pans, glass bottles,palm tree tunks, etc., the outcome is amazing and unique.

Here is what Miri Krimolovsky,  the renowned art critic wrote about his work:

“Multidisciplinary designer Roni. j Doron has a line of special Light Objects. Most are readymade, everyday manufactured objects changing their original purpose: A fan turned into a colorful kinetic lamp, Wonder Light- an old Wonder Top magically radiating blue light, a glowing set of old drawers and lights made of palm tree.
There’s a lot of humor in his readymade light objects, taking a simple daily object out of its natural place and transforming it into an elegant light fixture in unpredictable ways. Trapped Light is a mouse trap emitting through its holes, which can also be seen in Filtered Light which is made out of old strainers.
Doron is inspired by the original shape and color of the material, giving each and every object a unique lighting.”
Miri Krimolovski, art critic and curator.

 

 

 

 

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V I O L I N   S H O P

JONATHAN    HAI

 

A new comer to Ein Carmel’s Artist Colony is  the handsome, young, most talented JONATHAN HAI. Jonathan opened a new violin shop. With his magical hands he creates in his violin shop ,Violins, Violas, Chelli and Contra Bass’s. As he is a actually a trained Architect, His violin shop is one of the most well designed and elegant workshops I’ve ever seen. When he works you can see the love with which he does his work.

Here is an article about Jonathan the violin maker  which was published in one of the most read news papers in Israel - “Ha’aretz”:

 Stringing along with Cremona

By Yair Tarchinsky
CREMONA, Italy - “My mother always told me to marry an engineer, so in the end I did,” say Avivit Hai with a smile. “But suddenly, at the age of 34, my husband the engineer decided that his dream was to be a violin maker. We left everything and went to live in Italy.”

As he has done every morning for the past four years, her husband, Yonatan Hai, 38, wakes up and prepares for another day of study at the International School of Violin Making in the northern Italian town of Cremona. The school is considered the leading institution in its field.

Hai descends the steps of his 19th-century home, walks 200 meters along Garibaldi Street and has an espresso, standing up at the cafe opposite the school. From there he crosses the road, walks through a huge gate and goes up the venerable steps directly to the workshop. Another day of cutting, pasting and painting awaits him.

In theory, the school is classified as  a high school, but adults study there, too, most of them foreigners, who have come from all over the world to study Cremona’s secrets of violin making, free of charge. The school has about 180 students studying how to make bow instruments; they are divided into five levels, in each of which there are two classes - one for adults and one for Italian youths.

Since these are high-school studies, the adults must pass the Italian matriculation exams along with their young colleagues. Therefore their schedules include lessons that are not directly related to the subject they have come to study, such as mathematics, religion and Italian. Hai received an exemption from some of the lessons, after the school administration realized that an engineering graduate from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology had no need to study high-school physics.

It’s not by chance that the leading school for making string instruments is located in Cremona, a small town one hour by train from Milan. In the early 16th century, when records indicate violin making began, it was known as a world center in the field, along with its northern neighbor, Brescia. During that period the Cremonese market was based on only one family, the dynasty of Andrea Amati, which passed down the secret from father to son and employed only blood relatives as apprentices. Cremona’s hegemony in the field became entrenched in the early 17th century, after the plague killed most of their competitors from Brescia, and when Andrea Amati’s grandson Nicolo took over responsibility for the family workshop.

With the passing of the years and the expansion of the business, the Amati dynasty was compelled to train apprentices who were not family members. Thus the Amati monopoly came to an end, and additional companies were established in Cremona, strengthening the status of the town as the world’s violin-making capital.

The most famous of these companies was that of Antonio Stradivari, which went into business in the second half of the 17th century and became the most important violin workshop ever. Stradivari improved the model invented by Amati and tried altering the instrument’s proportions in different ways. For the past 300 years his developments have been the basis for the construction of new instruments. Today most of the leading players in the world use instruments created by the Italian craftsman, which bear his name in Latin, Stradivarius. About 600 such instruments still exist; their prestige is matched by their price: An original Stradivarius can sell for millions of dollars.

In September 1938 the Fascist regime in established the School of Violin Making and named it after Stradivari.

In his earlier life Hai worked at a firm of Tel Aviv architects for eight years, which included going to Italy to work in his field: the preservation of historical buildings. “When I was working in Italy, I felt that I had not exhausted my potential in the country,” he recalls. “I have always worked in wood and in Italy I looked for a way to do something related to preservation in wood.”

Through a Web search he became familiar with the field of crafting and preserving bow instruments, and with the school in Cremona. A visit to the school convinced him this was what he wanted to do.

His wife Avivit, now 37, was then about to give birth to their son Itamar, and so they returned to Israel and postponed fulfilling the dream for a year and a half. Then they moved on to Cremona, together with their son. Last year their daughter Ya’ara was born.

“The professional change was a difficult decision,” says Hai. “I liked what I did until then, and I had acquired a reputation, but I felt that something was missing. The construction field put me under pressure, and I felt that I couldn’t live with it over the long term. I wanted to do something with a personal imprint.”

In Israel there are at present about 15 violin makers. While the Hai family was deliberating the move to Cremona, Yonatan and Avivit spoke to some of them, and the reactions were encouraging. Only one of the violin makers recommended that Hai give up the dream and study furniture preservation, remarking that it’s difficult to make a living from work in the field, particularly in Israel.

In about two months Yonatan is scheduled to complete the exams and to receive certification as a violin maker from the school in Cremona. During his studies he even won first place in the Italian National Violin Makers Competition.

Yonatan plans to return to Israel immediately and to begin working in his field. He knows the market is very limited, not to mention that competition is tough from violins made in China, which lack the quality and the prestige of those handmade in Italy, but are significantly cheaper. However, he already has one client - his sister, viola player Galya Hai, who performs with singers Keren Peles, Aya Korem and Amir Benayoun, among others. She already plays a viola and a violin built by her brother.  

Contact  to violin shop:

 Box 5122 Zichron Ya’akov 30900 Israel

Tel: +972(0) 52 8218218

E-Mail: hai.violins@gmail.com