Dana Zaltzman’s pursuit of artistic training took her outside the usual path of Israeli art education. From 2005 to 2007, while studying at Tel Hai Academic College in northern Israel, she also trained in figurative painting in the private studio of painter Amir Nir. She then traveled to Norway to study with Odd Nerdrum, whose work draws deeply from Rembrandt and Caravaggio and reconsiders the language of kitsch through close observation and historical technique. In 2009, Zaltzman moved to Florence to enter the three year drawing and painting program at the Florence Academy of Art, completing her studies in 2012. An American school based in Italy, the Academy continues the tradition of nineteenth century French academic painting. Zaltzman now lives and works in Israel, and her paintings are held in private collections around the world.Her work is rooted in sustained observation, not only of objects themselves, but of the atmosphere they carry and the way light defines their presence over time. She paints from life, arranging each composition in the studio with deliberate care and controlling the light with equal precision. Finding the right subject can be a slow process. She may search through hundreds of vessels before finding one worth painting, or spend days locating a single object at the proper scale. Some works take weeks to set up and nearly a month to complete.Light is central to her practice. The walls of her studio are painted dark so reflected light does not interfere with what she sees, allowing her to focus fully on the relationships within the painting. She will hang a work upside down or study it in a mirror to test its structure, focus, and balance. Her classical training gives her the means to render these quiet arrangements with exactness, but the achievement of the work lies elsewhere, in its stillness, its gravity, and its acute sense of time passing. As Zaltzman has said, “There is a certain beauty here that the viewer needs me to show him.”