Artist Yaacov Heller created a painting of Jackie Evancho
singing with the Boca Raton Symphonia at Festival of the Arts Boca.
The Symphonia will use the painting as a fundraiser, selling
it to a donor it hopes will license back giclée prints that can be sold. Photo by Tim Stepien
By Paula Detwiller
When 10-year-old singing sensation Jackie Evancho performed with the Boca Raton Symphonia at Festival of the Arts Boca in March, internationally renowned local artist Yaacov Heller was not there.
“I had tickets and was looking forward to going,” Heller, a Boca Raton resident, says. “I’m a big fan of Jackie’s. But I had twin grandsons being born in Israel, so I flew to Tel Aviv to see them and had to miss the performance.”
You wouldn’t know it by looking at Heller’s re-creation of the performance on canvas. His 40- by 60-inch painting shows Evancho center stage surrounded by the orchestra, with lights strung in the background and the Centre for the Arts logo hanging above.
Heller’s friend and fellow Rotarian Steve Pomeranz, president of the Symphonia’s board of directors, suggested Heller make the painting as a fundraising mechanism for the orchestra.
“The idea is that someone can actually own the painting in exchange for a substantial donation,” Heller says, “and then license it to the Symphonia to make a limited number of giclée prints on canvas. I will hand-embellish and sign each one to make them more valuable. You’ll hardly be able to tell them apart from the original.”
Heller, 70, says investing his time in such a worthy cause is “what Rotarians do.” When he’s not sculpting, painting or making his signature silver jewelry at his art gallery/studio — Gallery 22 in the Royal Palm Place shopping center — Heller works on Rotary initiatives. He helps raise money to send talented local kids to college. He plans fundraisers for Home Safe, a nonprofit that provides care and treatment to abused, neglected and abandoned children in Palm Beach County.
And lately he’s been promoting and co-sponsoring Wednesday night “Jazz, Bossa and Blues” performances held at the top of the Boca Raton Bridge Hotel.
Heller’s artistic talents emerged at a young age. His family ran a hardware store in his native Cleveland Heights, Ohio. He would tinker in the back room, making animal sculptures with scraps of glass, pipe and metal.
“One day I came home from kindergarten with a small clay elephant. My parents said, ‘Take this back to whoever you stole it from.’ I said, ‘No, I made this.’ ” His parents enrolled him in an after-school program at the Cleveland Museum School of Art.
Following high school and a stint in the U.S. Navy, Heller joined his family in Florida and became a high-end Miami Beach hair stylist, sculpting hair instead of clay. In 1972 he moved to Israel, where his eldest sister was raising her family on a kibbutz. Heller set up a workshop in Jerusalem and began to sculpt figures and scenes from the Bible.
One of Heller’s proudest works is a sculpture of David and Goliath commissioned by former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin and given to President Gerald Ford during a White House visit in 1974. “David and Goliath was an analogy for the state of Israel,” he says. “A small country surrounded by great oppressors.” Ú
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