Couple Has a Knack for the Art of Collaboration

They’re two artists living and working under one roof, sharing so much intimacy--personally and professionally--that they’d surely burn out on togetherness if they weren’t so in tune with each other.

Adi Yekutieli and Esther Zahn, who have been married for seven years and collaborate on the upbringing of two children as well as the creation of mixed-media paintings, are, indeed, remarkably compatible. But not because they’re so much alike.

Although both are Jewish, they come from widely diverse cultural backgrounds. Yekutieli was born and raised in Israel and has traced his family’s early roots to Russia, Iraq and Austria. (His mother, who fled from Austria to Israel as a teen-ager, lost most of her family in the Holocaust.)

Zahn was raised by American parents in Japan, where she attended German schools, had Japanese servants and observed Jewish holidays. Her Brooklyn-bred Jewish father served in the military during the Korean War, then settled in Japan and made a living as a veterinarian. His wife, a Japanese-American from Hawaii, converted to Judaism before they married.

Zahn, who loved Japanese culture and absorbed it at a visceral level, found her world shattered at age 14, when her parents divorced. She moved with her mother to Hawaii and later relocated to Southern California.

Today, the colorful paintings Zahn and Yekutieli create reflect both Far East and Middle East influences, with a unique mix of Japanese and Jewish figures and spiritual symbols that often raise questions about the relevance of religious orthodoxy in contemporary life.

As their work illustrates, the artists still feel strong emotional ties to the cultures in which they were raised. But the differences between their upbringings have never been a source of conflict for the Fountain Valley couple.

They knew from the time they fell in love when they were fine arts students at Claremont Graduate School that a union of two independent, opinionated artists with such varied backgrounds would be a constant challenge. And that’s just what they wanted.

Each was looking for a partner who would keep them off guard, make them think, push them to ask the kinds of questions that inspire provocative works of art, like the three paintings they’ll have on display through March 19 as part of an exhibit called “Collaborations” at the Art Store Gallery in Newport Beach.

“There’s very little we can assume about each other. I don’t think I’ll ever figure Esther out,” says 33-year-old Yekutieli, exchanging a warm smile with his wife during a recent interview at their home.

Adds Zahn, who is 36: “I don’t take anything for granted with Adi. It’s fun to be surprised.”

The differences in their styles of communicating have added to the challenge of living and working together, they say. Yekutieli was raised in an atmosphere in which opinions were voiced freely and firmly, while Zahn learned the importance of nonverbal cues in Japanese culture.

“I have a need for silence, and Adi needs to talk, talk, talk,” Zahn says.

However, she adds, she has become more verbal since she’s been with Yekutieli, while he has developed an appreciation for the power of silence.

The differences in their personalities are also evident in their body language: Zahn--who has long, auburn hair, dark eyes and an air of serenity--hardly shifts her position as she sits in an easy chair in her living room during a three-hour interview. Meanwhile, Yekutieli--bearded and barefoot--keeps moving back and forth from the couch to the floor, hardly able to contain his energy.

The couple admit they seldom have quiet time to reflect on their lifestyle as they do on this recent morning while their children--Addam, 5, and, Noa, 2--are being watched by a neighbor.

On most days, Yekutieli and Zahn are constantly moving in separate directions, meeting only briefly when one comes home to be with the children while the other goes to work.

Both teach classes at the Orange County High School of the Arts in Los Alamitos. Yekutieli is also a Hebrew instructor, and Zahn works part time as a hairdresser.

“We’re always coming and going. It’s like the changing of the guard,” says Zahn, noting that they arrange their schedules so that Addam and Noa seldom have to be left with a baby-sitter.

But at 9 p.m., after the children have been tucked in, Yekutieli and Zahn get together and begin the work that makes them both feel rejuvenated, no matter how tired they are at the end of their busy days.

Nearly every night, they spend four intense hours working in an upstairs studio cluttered with a wide assortment of materials, including water colors, acrylics, pencils, pens, fabrics and photographs.

They discuss the status of each painting in advance so they can work mostly in silence, but they also allow plenty of room for spontaneity. For example, they note, they impulsively decided that a female Japanese figure Zahn suggested they use in one piece to depict God should be painted by Yekutieli, just to keep things interesting.

The artists agree that the unpredictability that keeps their personal relationship exciting also enhances the collaboration they began just over a year ago with a series of 34 paintings inspired by the Persian Gulf War.

In the artists’ statement for their series, called “Beginning of 1991,” Yekutieli and Zahn explain that they produced the paintings together as a way of dealing with the despair and helplessness they felt during a war that they philosophically opposed--and that put Yekutieli’s family in Israel in immediate danger.

Through visual stories using a king, an angel and a clown as symbols of “power, hope and the game of life,” they hoped to communicate the message that war is madness and that “there are no winners,” Yekutieli noted.

The process of creating this series of paintings--which was exhibited at the BC Space Gallery in Laguna Beach and the Framewright Gallery in Fountain Valley, and later shown at galleries in Colorado, Michigan and Idaho--convinced the couple that they could work together.

Although they had previously taken on projects as a team while working as designers in the textile industry during a yearlong stay in Israel, this was the first time they had collaborated as painters.

They found the experience so satisfying that they are now collaborating on another ambitious series of mixed-media paintings, which--on the strength of their anti-war series--they’ve been asked to create for an exhibit scheduled for spring, 1993, at the Wignall Gallery at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga.

This time, Yekutieli and Zahn will be dealing with a more personal theme--the diversity in their heritage. Through this series of about 35 large-scale works--which they hope will be seen in Japan, Israel, Germany and Russia among other countries--they will compare cultural symbols as a way of exploring their own identities.

Both Yekutieli and Zahn struggle with a sense of rootlessness resulting from the fact that they haven’t come to terms with the various cultural influences in their lives.

Zahn says she doesn’t see Japan as her homeland anymore, but she finds herself trying, again and again, to capture the “serenity, clarity and harmony” of Japanese images in her art.

Like Yekutieli, Zahn also has a lot of affection for Israel, where, she points out, family-centered Jewish rituals are a way of life, neighborhoods are close-knit and a sense of common purpose makes people feel connected.

“I cried when we left Israel after a visit last summer. It’s a place where you really feel a part of something,” she says. “But there’s something seductive about Southern California that keeps me here.”

Yekutieli, who was active in the peace movement in Israel, says he’s “perplexed” by American culture, which he claims doesn’t place enough value on children, friendship, art or intellectual pursuits. Still, he acknowledges, this country has proven to be fertile ground for his own creativity.

“This is a neutral place where I can explore,” he says.

M.A. Greenstein, the Laguna Art Museum’s curator of education and co-curator of the exhibit Yekutieli and Zahn are putting together for the Wignall Gallery, says the couple’s latest work reflects a trend among contemporary artists who are “looking at their own cultural heritage to make sense out of their world.”

However, she adds, Yekutieli and Zahn stand out because of the way they collaborate.

That became clear to Greenstein last summer, when she hired the couple to teach a children’s art class at the Laguna Art Museum. The subject was how to collaborate on mixed-media art works, but the instructors didn’t immediately pair up the students. Instead, they asked the children to produce a work of art individually, then find a way to put it together with someone else’s creation.

That’s how Yekutieli and Zahn work--first separately, then together. Greenstein says their style of collaboration reflects “a respect for the individual voice . . . without one person dominating the other in a working relationship.”

They maintain the same sense of equality in their personal relationship. For example, they’ve taken a truly egalitarian approach to parenting. Yekutieli spent three years at home after their son was born, while Zahn fulfilled the breadwinner role. And now she fits in her part-time work around Yekutieli’s full-time work schedule and spends most of her time with the kids. They’re planning to switch roles again this summer.

Working as a team professionally has made them feel stronger as a couple, they agree. However, they add, when they first started collaborating on the multicultural series, they were dealing with such personal issues they both felt uncomfortable, and they had to get some distance from the project before they could continue.

They learned that, because their work involves so much intimacy, there’s a danger of losing their sense of autonomy, noted Zahn, who guards against that by cultivating friendships and finding more time for herself.

On the other hand, the intimacy she shares with Yekutieli fosters a level of trust that enables them to be vulnerable, to take risks and to challenge each other.

“Working together has brought us closer. I feel Adi is much more my friend now,” Zahn says. “Our relationship feels calmer than it used to be. We don’t allow tension to build. There are no games between us.”

That frees the artists to concentrate on the message they are trying to communicate: the idea, as they have discovered in their personal relationship, that cultural diversity adds richness to life.

“One culture shouldn’t tell another how to behave,” Yekutieli says.

“We should all learn from each other.”