Draft:Elie Shamir

Elie Shamir (born 1953) is an Israeli visual artist and art teacher. His works include classic representational portraits and Israeli landscapes, and he is known as the Jezreel Valley painter.

Background
Shamir was born in Kfar Yehoshua in the Jezreel Valley. He studied fine arts at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem and taught there after graduation. His artworks earned awards from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2005 and from the Minister of Education, Culture, and Sport of Israel in 2006.

Shamir is known as the Jezreel Valley painter, especially after a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2005 titled "Emek: On the way to Kfar-Yehoshua. "His paintings integrate both the history of art and the history of the Jezreeli-Israeli, and "any reading of his work obliges one to consider both of them."

Notable artworks
Shamir exhibited his artworks in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and Haifa Museum of Art, in galleries across Israel and Boston, Massachusetts. A partial list of Shamir's paintings includes:
 * Valley Landscape, 1990
 * Family Portrait (Achilles Chooses the String of Pearls), 1995
 * Parents, 1997
 * Jezreel Valley from Um El Fahm, 2006
 * Valley Landscape with Jenin on the Horizon, 2007
 * To the Valley, 2008-2009
 * Father and I - Life Size, 2011
 * Tel-Kasis, 2012
 * Farewell, 2012
 * An Old Oak in Spring Time, 2012
 * Oak Thicket
 * Father and I Retrospectively, 2018
 * Uri Ben-Dror at the Nursery, 2019
 * Self-Portrait at Mount Nebo, 2019

Large oil landscape paintings like "Jezreel Valley from Um El Fahm" and "Valley Landscape with Jenin on the Horizon" have a link to the tradition of American landscape paintings, specifically to the Hudson River School art movement from the mid-19th century. They show subdued landscapes that "[...] convey that dusty feeling that exists in Israeli landscape."

Public artworks
Besides paintings, Shamir initiated and planned a mosaic in Kfar Yehushua in memory of the architect Richard Kauffmann and as a way to reunite and work together. Citizens of the moshav collaboratively made the mosaic in 2004. The mosaic shows a map of the moshav, mentions other places in Israel that Kauffmann planned, and includes a portrait of the architect and an image of Euclid.

In 2021, Eli Shamir painted on a Flying Cargo truck as part of a commissioned public space art project titled "ART ON THE ROAD".