Jochanan Ligtenberg

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Jochanan Ligtenberg was born in 1942 in Holland. For the first three years of his life, he hid from the Nazis in a farm and never saw daylight.

After World War II, Ligtenberg’s family moved to Australia. He specialized in fresco paintings and large murals. He won the second prize in painting in the State of Queensland of Australia in 1989.

Since then, Ligtenberg has stopped receiving commissions for fresco paintings and started to explore the technique of the 17th century Dutch masters as an attempt to return to his Dutch roots. Today, Ligtenberg is one of the world experts of this Dutch-Flemish Renaissance painters such as Brueghel, Adriaen and Isaac van Ostade, David Teniers, Aelbert Cuyp, Johannes Vermeer and Pieter De Hooch.

Currently, Ligtenberg spends his time between his studios in Israel and Australia, experimenting with painting in the glaze technique, in which the paint is not applied “a la prima” but through many layers of thin, transparent oil painting.

Each of Ligtenberg’s paintings takes between a year and 18 months to complete. This is due to the sharp details he shows in his artwork and to the fact that in the final stages he uses a magnifying glass to complete the artwork.

Ligtenberg’s artwork can be found in prominent collections around the world, such as the Vatican collection, the White House Presidential collection and the Israeli Prime Minister collection.