ABOUT OSNAT PORAT

I'm a visual artist working at the intersection of art and psychology. With an academic background in the field, I have never seen the two as separate. For me, painting is a way of making something inward visible, a feeling, a question, an idea about the human mind.

My paintings bring abstraction and realism together through a process that moves between intention and intuition. Sometimes I begin with a clear image in mind, carefully guiding the flow of paint to create particular shapes and movement. Other times, I start with a general idea, a mood, or a colour palette, allowing the paint to move more freely and influence what emerges. As I work, I search within the layers of colour, recognizing forms, developing details, and gradually bringing realistic elements into focus. Whether carefully guided or allowed to emerge more freely, the realistic forms grow from the abstraction itself. I don't simply place them onto the background; I draw them out from within it.

Each painting carries an emotional intention, shaped by my experiences, questions, and my understanding of the world. Painting helps me process emotions and experiences that are not always easy to express in words. Sometimes the meaning is clear to me from the beginning; other times, I discover additional layers of meaning only after the work is complete.

My work draws on two different ways of understanding the mind, and I don't treat them as interchangeable. Depth psychology offers a symbolic language for dreams, identity, the unconscious, and experiences that resist words. Carl Jung is an important influence, though not the only one. Modern psychology and neuroscience offer another perspective, grounded in what can be observed, tested, and measured. I'm drawn to what happens when both are allowed to illuminate the same human question. That balance also shapes the paintings themselves. The realistic gives the eye something to hold onto; the abstract stays open and unresolved.

Research on visual ambiguity suggests that unresolved images can hold our attention and invite exploration. Neuroaesthetic research also suggests that deeply engaging art can involve processes tied to personal relevance and self-reflection. I'm fascinated by that moment when we know what we're looking at, but haven't yet decided what it means.

Perhaps I work this way because it's also how I've lived, moving between cultures, perspectives, and ways of understanding the world, drawn both to what can be examined and to what stays symbolic and hard to name. My paintings hold that same duality: the empirical and the mysterious, the seen and the sensed, held together without asking one to replace the other.

I share the psychology woven into each piece not to explain the painting away, but to offer another way in. The image stands on its own; the psychology opens a further layer. I hope each work leaves you with something to carry with you: a question, a moment of recognition, or a different way of seeing something that was already there. For me, that is where psychology becomes visible.

Osy