We are happy to welcome the husband-and-wife team Chaim Bezalel and Yonnah Ben Levy (a Mercer Island native) to Island Books. In 1989, they decided to create a collaboration, temporarily putting aside their own individual pursuits. At the time, Chaim Bezalel was a new immigrant to Israel. A musician and photographer, he had studied film in college but had spent the past ten years as a stockbroker, including on Wall Street. Yonnah Ben Levy was working at several jobs in Jerusalem including illuminating parchments, painting on pottery, and teaching dance. Together they experimented on techniques of combining photography and painting, which they soon began to market in the form of greeting cards and posters, which sold around the world. Twenty-eight years later, they are are still together with the combined signature of Bezalel-Levy. They divide their year between studios in Stanwood, Washington and Ashkelon, Israel.
American Scrolls: Returning to America after many years abroad, artist couple Chaim Bezalel and Yonnah Ben Levy rediscover the country. Living and working in several regions including the Hudson River Valley and Catskills, birthplace of the American landscape, the Gulf Coast of Florida, the Sonoran Desert, and the Pacific Northwest, they have created a series of paintings depicting the breadth and depth of the American landscape. This includes a section on paintings depicting community and descriptive passages and poems.
Touching on Place: This book includes original paintings and photographs of architectural elements in Israel with descriptions and some historical information. Touching on Place represents the culmination of a 25 year project of a husband and wife artistic collaboration documenting the history of Israel through architectural elements.
