Before Oct. 7, Sam Griffin’s work was personal and introspective; then he was drafted into the Israeli army
By Simi Horwitz
May 15, 2025
In a post-Oct 7 world, Sam Griffin, who served a tour of duty, first in the southern Gaza Envelope for two and a half months, and then for one month in the Southern Gaza Strip, has evolved as both a human being and a painter.
“Before, I was a British-born painter living in Israel,” he said. “Now I am an Israeli painter.”
The articulate, heady, and amiable 35-year-old artist met with me at Hebrew Union College’s Bernard Heller Museum where Aftermath, an exhibition of 14 of his post-Oct. 7 oil paintings will be on display until the end of June.
Griffin’s work consists mostly of large landscapes — some rural, others urban — all of which seem to take place during an ominous dawn or dusk, amid a sense of impending doom and intense isolation. An unknown disaster has just occurred or is about to take place. The canvases are covered with agitated, rapidly applied brush strokes coupled with the blotting off and wiping out of previously layers of paint.
“I’m finding beauty in the horror without being too specific,” Griffin said as I sat with him and Heller Museum director Jean Bloch Rosensaft and Ram Ozeri, founder and director of the Jerusalem Biennial where Aftermath was exhibited as a solo show in 2024. “The paintings are a window into what I was looking at. I wanted to leave space for the viewers to step in and interpret the pictures in their own way. No, they’re not political paintings.”
“Sam brings us into the heart of darkness,” Rosensaft said. “The rubble beneath the gorgeous blue skies, the sunrise, the flares. Those liminal moments. It’s heart-wrenching. At the same time I’m awed by Sam’s capacity to put it on canvas and express tremendous resilience and an embrace for life. I felt it was so important to show this work in this moment, which has the capacity and strength and hope to break through the news. It is at once a particularly Israeli theme and a universalist theme.”
The paintings are notably devoid of people, short of a faceless soldier or two featured in a few pieces. Among these is a faceless self-portrait of the artist.
Griffin is drawn to faceless figures. Like his earlier “Wise Old Men” series in which Griffin was searching for a literal, spiritual and existential connection to grandfathers he had never known, here too he was seeking to evoke a deeply personal and global image.
Though, in the Aftermath paintings, he stressed, “These are not archetypal soldiers in an archetypal war — they are archetypal Israeli soldiers in an archetypal Israeli war. Israeli wars are different from other wars. Wars are forced upon us. In both the Yom Kippur War or the current war we were attacked. We are the most peace-loving people, especially those living in a kibbutz. They want to serve as the bridge. It’s the safest place in the world. For something so horrible to happen here…”
A turning point moment
The son of a cartoonist and surrounded by art books, Griffin grew up in south east London and started to draw at an early age. “Lucien Freud was the first painter I saw that made me decide I want to paint,” he said. “Jake Ward-Evans is a contemporary British painter who inspires me today. Most of all, my influences are from the Spanish and Dutch Baroque period: Rembrandt, Velazquez, El Greco, Rubens, Caravaggio and Tiepolo.”
Growing up he defined himself as a secular Jew, “always proud to be Jewish, but certainly not observant,” he said.
In 2006, he traveled to Israel, wanting to experience the country, but mostly because he thought it might be “fun.” He says the experience was life-altering — especially when he “touched the stones at the Western Wall.”
“Suddenly I felt I was a link in a chain,” he said. “That was a turning point moment.”
When he returned to England, feeling more Jewish than ever, a profound curiosity about religious observance — its discipline, practice, ritual and spiritual elements — surfaced as well. And he found them most deeply expressed and embodied in Orthodox observance. In 2010, he decided to make Aliyah.
“I wanted to live among Jews,” he said. “I wanted to join the IDF. I wanted to experience the camaraderie and contribute to Israel. My parents were supportive, though they were not that happy about my serving in the military. My mother hoped I would meet a nice Jewish girl.”
(His wife, Rachel, a Washington, DC native, is an obstetrician and the couple are parents to three small boys.)
In Israel he spent the first six months on a kibbutz, working, and learning Hebrew. In 2011 he began his two year tour of duty in the army’s infantry combat unit. “It was a deep dive into Israeli culture for sure,” he said.
On Oct 8, just one day after the Hamas terrorist attack, he was drafted. Like most other soldiers, he explained, up until that point he had just been living his life — as a husband, father and painter.
“Most Israeli soldiers are not into military careers,” he said. “They are artists, start-up tech people, electricians. Yes, there is an admiration and appreciation for soldiers, but there’s no reverence because we’re all in this together.”