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When you go to paint outside it’s always an adventure with assured surprises… You wake up in the morning, early in the morning, arrange quickly, and rush to the bus.

Sometimes you have an idea of the place you want to paint, other times you just look through the bus’s window and wait to see what catches your eyes. Either way, you never know what today’s painting will look like.

Finding the right spot is crucial! You better spend even one hour carry on your things in a new location, looking for the “Thing”. But you also want to be ready before the sun comes out and do her show…

The most exciting part of painting outdoors is your curious visitors. They come in many forms: unexpected weather, wild animals, interesting people, and more.

Animals know you are there from the moment you set foot in their territory, and if they come near you, it’s only after a long time of watching you and feeling that you are not a threat. If you are lucky, they may even hang out with you for a while.

Once, while painting the Ein Kedem Spring in Israel, I suddenly realized that a wolf had been staring at me from only a few meters away. Another time, while painting near the Limmat river in Zurich, three swans came and joined my painting session for over an hour! They came close, and seemed curious about what I was doing. Afterwards, they went back to the lake, swam next to me, and rested on the shore. As a tribute to the great birds, I ended up making them the protagonists of the painting.

People are like animals (at least in this case…). They come near you after they feel there is no risk. They look at the painting and see your heart through it, and sometimes, they open their heart back to you. One guy I met in Rigiblick (a neighborhood in Zurich) told me about his father’s punishments and how he abused him as a child. He also told me he met Kim Jong Un twenty years ago here in Switzerland and that he knows from him that being the Supreme Leader of North Korea wasn’t his dream (I don’t know if the man really met him but Un did live here for 4 years, at that time).

During my Sheep painting in Affoltern, a woman came up to me and we started to chat. Surprisingly, it turned out that we had so many things in common. She even started to speak and sing to me in Hebrew, which deeply moved me, especially after a long time of not seeing my family. Since then, we have become friends. My closest friend in Zurich is a woman that I met while drawing horses in a stable. She worked there and we had an immediate click!.

A week after, in a rainy day, I found a shelter under a bridge and painted the skateboard place. Three cops were worried for me not to get in troubles in this street, one cop came after and admitted about his real youth love to painting with a big smile and a sparkle in his eyes. Later that day, a man came and rapped for me, told jokes and suddenly poured his heart over his 4-year-old child who was taken away from him.

If you love to paint, and feel a bit lonely working alone at home, go outside and paint the world, who knows what adventures are waiting for you out there.