Bringing the Dead Sea to Life Through Art and Music is a joint project sponsored by Artists for Nature Foundation , the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, The Hoopoe Foundation, the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, Tel Aviv University, and the Amman Center for Peace and Development.  Over 20 international artists and musicians were brought together to raise awareness- and create art about- the Dead Sea’s ecological plight.

I was privileged to join the ANF group in Jordan and Israel in March of 2017. We painted in a magnificent landscape with fantastic wildlife. The people we met were unfailingly welcoming and generous.  All the artists in this select group were extraordinarily gifted, hardworking, and splendid travel companions.  We painted, hiked, ate delicious Middle Eastern foods, sketched hoopoes, sand grouse and ibex, soaked (bobbed like corks) in the Dead Sea’s caustic chemical soup, then soaked up the beautiful cultures of Jordan and Israel.

If you’d like to see what it was like painting on location in the Middle East, here is an excellent article in PleinAir’s online magazine, Outdoor Painter, featuring Hudson Valley painter Jim Coe and yours truly.

The artworks from this trip are being published as a book and will be shown in a traveling exhibition in months to come.
At ANF’s blog, you can watch awesome videos by Yuval Dax and Chieh Te Liang, get goose bumps listening to Paul Winter, our resident musician, perform solos on the salt-crusted shore of the Dead Sea, and learn about the issues surrounding this strange, beautiful and extreme part of Planet Earth.