I was rather excited when I received my first commission ever, from the literary magazine Mikan Ve'eylakh. This Hebrew publication was interested in a foreign interpretation of the (Hebrew) alphabet, and I was tasked with illustrating the title of its three main sections.

A lot of what Mikan Ve'eylakh stands for revolves around the idea of Jewish diaspora. Maybe it's just my Austrian heritage, but first I heard diapsora and then I heard culture, and suddenly my head was full of images from 1900 Vienna.

After that the project took a bit of a Jugendstil turn...

My love affair with the Mikan guys didn't stop there, as I was recontacted to draw a cover for the first edition of the journal.

The result involved a gate (as it appears, gates having been trending for centuries in the world of Jewish scholarly publishing) and, well, diasporic roots, diasporic seeds and diasporic flowers...