Hagit Shahal
[1] Her father, Moshe Shahal, was an activist in the Betar movement in Poland, and immigrated to Mandatory Palestine on his own as a teenager, before World War II.[2] From 1989 to 1991, Hagit worked as a courtroom sketch artist for ABC News in Israel, illustrating trials that were of interest to the foreign media.Between 1992 and 2000, Hagit worked for the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, where she illustrated the front pages of the weekend magazine, Hamusaf LeShabbat.She also painted portraits of Israeli politicians, including Aryeh Deri, Ehud Barak, David Levy, Benjamin Netanyahu, Avigdor Liberman, and Haim Ramon, as well as portraits of foreign political figures such as Bill Clinton, Hassan Nasrallah, Slobodan Milošević, King Hussein, and others.Like many other artists, she, too, has repeatedly reverted to making self-portraits at different creative junctures, constituting a kind of complex journey that deals with essence, identity, mood, and state of mind.