Tamar Kander
Transcending boundaries
~ story and photos by Chrissy Alspaugh
The paintings that emerge from Tamar Kander’ s tools are as much a reflection of her life’ s journey as they are the result of the decades she’ s spent honing a unique approach to art.
With her mixed-media, impressionist work gracing galleries around the globe, Kander’ s art transcends boundaries, both in geography and imagination. But despite her work’ s reach and early years living abroad, Kander has made her home in Brown County, where the serene landscape soaks into the fabric of her work.
Art was natural in Kander’ s heart and mind from a young age, growing up in Israel.“ I was always drawing,” she remembers, warmly. When faced with limitations— like the lack of paper—” I started drawing on the walls!” she said, laughing. Family support kept Kander’ s passion aflame. Recognizing her desire to create murals, her mother replaced her crayons with water paints.“ To my family, whatever I did was just fine,” Kander said.
Kander moved to South Africa before her 10 th birthday. She earned a bachelor’ s in fine arts in Johannesburg before earning a master’ s in fine arts in London. Further studying painting and printmaking, Kander moved to New York City in the mid 1980s, before what she thought would be a short visit to Bloomington.“ I realized how tired I was from all of my energy just going toward living in New York,” she said.“ Here, I had so much more of myself to put into my paintings.”
Today, her downstairs home studio is a place of quiet focus, away from the distractions of daily
16 Our Brown County • March / April 2025