Nobody Does Purple Like David

by Mary Lu Laffey

When Ben Gurion visited the town of Haifa, he was presented with flowers by a little boy with soulful eyes and dark, curly ringlets. Gurion said to him, "David, You don’t win wars without taking a few risks." Other six-year-olds might have dismissed his comments, but David Ari Cohen never forgot his brush with greatness and the words the first Prime Minister of Israel said to him. Take risks? Oh, yes!

"What I feel at that moment is what I want to come up on the paper," he explains. Cohen has been painting since childhood, developing his art first in his studies as a young man, and then as an adult in tandem with his professional career. It isn’t easy. Like editing his magazines, where it is writing and rewriting toward clarity, his art evolves toward clarity as he creates and recreates, changes the strokes of the brush, reveals the expressive line, or layers his colors.

When he experiences beauty, Cohen says, he becomes breathless. Its purity first captivates him and then, motivates him to create. What he wants you to see in his work is his artistic interpretation of that reaction.

One can see the influence in his bold stokes by the French masters, Paul Cézanne, and Henri Matisse. Another French painter, a 19th century modernist named Pierre Bonnard spent his life capturing "the moment." Bonnard is remembered for his play of mood and light to express the emotional charge of a setting. Like Bonnard, Cohen, too, uses his palette to express his feelings.

A contemporary artist who paints in oil, acrylic, and, in the past two years, watercolor, Cohen also uses collage and mixed media to capture his subjects. Sometimes realistically, on other occasions in abstract. He discovers many of his subjects while traveling. Cohen has completed a number of pieces of views from above the clouds, of passengers in airports waiting their connections, and is working on series of South African seascapes.

His devotion to sunlight forms the basis of his palette. Jean Hirch, his art teacher at the Evanston Art Center, encourages him and says of his colors, "No one does purple like David."

I asked Cohen, "If you were to invite dream guests for dinner, who would they be?"

David Cohen's eyes widened as he answers without hesitation: "Golda Meir and the actress who portrayed her, (snapping his fingers to recall her name), Ingrid Bergman. Both shared similar ideals in life Both were strong, powerful women. Intelligent and smart, too. Also passionate -- they loved life and had a passion for life. Imagine having the two of them at the same table! " Moving across the dining room in his condominium to top off a glass of wine, he said "If I were to invite guys ... it would be King David… with Winston Churchill. "How could I have guests without artists?" he chastised himself as he placed the bottle of California Pinot Noir back on the counter. "I would have Michelangelo meet Cézanne. Matisse and Picasso and Bonnard. Those sharing a table ... with Mozart's Requiem in the background ... It would be too much," he laughed.

Cohen is also the founder and publisher of Pink Pages, Inc., publishers of Pink Pages magazine in Chicago, Denver, and beginning in 2004, once again in New York City. He has lived in New York, Chicago, and Denver. Currently he resides in Chicago.