Anat Ronen is a muralist, which seems a very small word for her very large art. An immigrant from Israel to the United States, Ronen travels the world on talent-based visas, spreading color and thought everywhere she goes. Entirely self-taught and working in a variety of mediums from artist’s chalk to latex house-paint, Ronen has left over 500 works around the globe, from China to Israel, Columbia to Germany. And of course, to her hometown in the United States, Houston, Texas.
Like the rest of us, COVID-19 has put a temporary halt to Ronen’s globetrotting. Close to home, she took advantage of school closures to finish a stunning full-room mural in a room for students with autism, but then… Again, like the rest of us, then what?
Quipping “a painting a day keeps the virus away,” Ronen has been filling her Facebook, her Instagram, and her driveway with vivid, colorful art. Stunning in a large-scale photorealistic manner, her art captivates. She drew two of her three house-cats, Shooshka and Shokolit, on her driveway for Chalk on the Block, a virtual Houston area art show.
Stepping up to a larger scale, she drew a massive animorphic mural on her driveway, of a pair of immense gloved hands making a heart. Animorphic art, in this context, means art drawn in a distorted manner that, when viewed from the correct angle and especially through a camera lens, appears to leap from the surface (or sink through it) and become 3D. In this case, the huge hands appear to cup the artist, sitting in the shadows between them.
Following that, Ronen kept busy by a long-distance collaboration with three other artists. She along with Naomi Haverland, Jo Russell, and Jessi Queen each painted a quarter of a portrait on their respective driveways, all based on a photo of a mutual friend and colleague, RN Shelley Brenner, a nurse anesthetist who has not had time for painting since this all began. Each spun their own style of of the portrait, and the results were assembled into a brilliant, stunning bortrait of a hero of our age. For her quarter, Ronen was inspired by other nurse heros – the posters for WWII nurses out of the 1940s.
Source: ABC13
Photo: Flickr, orangefan_2011, https://www.flickr.com/photos/orangefan_2011/9697345244, Slightly modified to increase brightness.