Tamari, Vladmir (1942--)

Vladmir Tamari was born in Jerusalem in 1942 and is the brother of artist Vera Tamari and classical music singer Tayna Tamari. He studied physics and art between 1957 and 1963 at the American University of Beirut and continued his studies at St Martin’s School of Art in London. He moved to Japan in 1970 and has lived in Tokyo for over 40 years. For his political activities, he was held for three days in an Israeli prison when returning from a family visit in 1976, and has lived in exile ever since. Tamari has been active in parallel careers as an artist, inventor and physicist. He invented and built three-dimensional drawing instruments inspired by the work of Buckminster Fuller. He also worked extensively in typography and published on Arab typography and fonts in the early 1970s. He designed the Al Quds font and patented an idea for unified letter endings. He worked with artist Mona Saudi on a book of drawings and interviews with Palestinian refugee children. Tamari primarily works in watercolors influenced by memories of the geography of his homeland and its people. His work explores vibrant images of landscapes in different degrees of abstraction and complex compositions of the pictorial space. His paintings have evolved towards abstraction, where his interest seems to lie in the translucency of colors and in the effect of light, its refractions and transformations on forms and surfaces. This also follows his scientific investigations through the invention of various optical instruments.