Shon Yermi was born in Jerusalem in 1975 and grew up in the Shmuel HaNavi neighborhood, on Tel Arza Street. Back then it was a mixed neighborhood, where secular families lived alongside Haredi and traditional religious ones.
When he was 8 his family moved to the Katamonim, which was entirely secular at the time. For him it was a culture shock, and meeting people so different from him was hard. That is where he started to paint, even in front of his teachers, some of whom understood how much painting meant to him. He lived with his family in the Katamonim for about 20 years and finished high school at the Denmark school, with great difficulty.
Shon never studied painting anywhere. The ideas for his paintings, he says, came from his soul and out of hard times. At first he kept his paintings on scraps of paper and drew ideas from them, and only years later did he dare to paint big and give his work to anyone who asked. He once joined a small painting course, sat in front of a teacher and tried to paint a vase like everyone else. It bored him, and after a week and a half he left. The teacher himself told him: "You'll only develop on your own. Here it's just passing the time."
Since then Shon has developed one or two styles of his own. He calls himself "an improved painter of myself": with every painting he tries to make it more interesting than the last. He paints every day, has a house full of paintings, and has a wall of his own in our gallery.
