Esther was born in Jerusalem in 1966. She spent her teenage years on Kibbutz Magen in the western Negev and returned to Jerusalem after her army service. She only discovered her talent for painting during the COVID pandemic. Self-taught, she experiments with different mediums and draws on the landscapes of her childhood, her family and her love of color and texture.
Today Esther lives in Jerusalem with her family. She paints, leads workshops and teaches painting using the creative release method, the same method she learned and still paints by. Her students are children, women and men from age 5 to 80, and she teaches in many different mediums. She also runs the family picture framing business with her husband, Mordechai (Mouki) Cohen, and together they decorate homes in Jerusalem and around the world.
Her work is known for its distinctive color and its range of mediums. She paints in oils on canvases she buys and prepares herself, which Mouki stretches and frames for her. She also loves watercolor, gouache and soft pastel, and uses them to paint the landscapes of her childhood, both as she saw them and as she remembers them. These are the kibbutz and the beautiful, innocent western Negev as it was before the war.
Her paintings invite you into the story of her life. She came to Kibbutz Magen on her own as a girl and grew up there in a youth group, served in the Air Force, and went on to raise a family and become an artist. Painting surprised her at a fairly late age, and she calls it an outright miracle. "I was very lucky," she says. "It's something that happens once in a lifetime."
