Arrivals: Ciliann likes beautiful things
| Published date | 07 January 2021 |
| Date | 07 January 2021 |
| Author | BASIA MONKA |
Sarah Bresler, aka Ciliann, the online drawing and painting teacher, decided to open her YouTube channel during the summer of 2020. She says that the novel coronavirus situation enabled her to do it, and thanks to lockdowns she finally had time to work on it.
Ciliann wants to help other young adults to learn how to draw and paint for their own pleasure.
"I am not a professional. Professionals are in their own league. I know where I am," she says but adds that, in her opinion, art is a skill and at her mini-art school (as she calls it), she wants to show that "everyone can reach art and learn it, if they want."
When she decided to start her channel, during the summer of 2020, she was painting every night. She made over 100 videos, working on them by night while her children were asleep.
Sarah by day, Ciliann by night
It was December 2010, when, in the middle of the snow blizzard, she left New York and moved to Beitar, next to Jerusalem. Three weeks later, she married a yeshiva student, Yehonothan Haim. She met him the traditional Jewish matchmaking way, during a visit to Israel, shortly before her aliyah.
As a 10-year-old girl, she wrote in her diary: "I love Israel, I really want to go there."
But when, two years after writing these words, she first visited Israel, she was shocked seeing people throwing garbage on the streets.
"I was a little bit sad. I did not know if I could live here," she recalls, so aliyah was not in her plans after that, but eventually the right shidduch changed it all.
It was her husband who noticed her artistic potential and encouraged her to improve her skills. In the US, she was studying to be a teacher. She never had a formal art education, but she always enjoyed art.
Her big, very personal, inspiration was her grandfather Mark Rubinstein, originally from Kraków, Poland, who died four years ago at the age of 104. In America, he designed bridges and painted as a hobby. Painting was also a hobby of Bresler's her whole life, for as long she can remember. She was not planning to make it her profession.
"When I got married, my husband noticed my talent and wanted me to work on it – and to teach it," she says, "but I had just gotten married, was settling in to a new country and had to learn Hebrew. So we sort of shelved it for several years."
A decade passed by. Today, Bresler is a...
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