A Life That Never Went to Plan
A personal lecture on art and freedom, fatherhood and family, successes and failures — and the ability to build yourself again. And again.
At three years old, he arrived in Israel with his mother, a solo jazz pianist, escaping his violent father. He grew up in Jerusalem, struggling with reading, school, emotions, and identity.
He grew up in a family with three lovely sisters, all from his mother’s second marriage – to a photographer. Their father’s grandfather was one of the founders of the Hebrew University.
Ilya’s grandfather was head of the Department of Psychiatry at Albert Einstein Hospital in New York.
Like anyone else at the time, Ilya had to serve in the army.
After his service, he traveled around the world with his little ocarina around his neck and began a career as a street musician. This career lasted, all in all, for fifteen years, mainly in Denmark, where he has a son and an ex-wife. After one year of traveling he went to study art for four years at Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem, where he got his B.A of Art.
Over those fifteen years, he traveled with his music and art all over the world, performing as a street musician. Besides that playing in theater, film music, dance, exhibitions, and workshops.
He produced a documentary film in West Africa and a short film in New York. Led workshops in the Sinai Desert and the Red Sea, as well as in Iceland, India, Ibiza, and other places.
After all this, he returned to Israel for what was meant to be one year—a stay that has now lasted more than twenty years. During this time, he remarried, had three more lovely children, designed and built a three story shipping-containers house with his own hands, measuring 265 m². Divorced for the second time, and now lives in a special and unique house in Haifa.
The escape
A boy born into an American intellectual artistic family arrives in Israel at the age of three with his mother, a solo jazz pianist, fleeing his violent father (journalist writer). He grows up with reading and studying issues, emotional, and identity ambivalence which reflect in his art and music.
Two degrees
After high school, compulsory military service, followed by an escape to Europe, as a street musician for one year, in which he went to study painting in NY.
Came back to Israel to study art at Bezalel.
During his studies he leaves for a student exchange in Denmark — and falls in love. As he finishes Bezalel and receives his degree, he becomes a father.
And so, instead of returning to the planned route, a life begins that is hard to fit into any single one.
Twelve years in Denmark
He stays for 12 more years in Denmark. Playing in the streets, painting, photographing, making short movies, making music and leading drumming workshops. But something is missing: the sun… And above all — Sinai and the Red Sea.
Sinai
So he starts taking his drumming workshops south. What begins out of longing becomes a project that runs for almost ten years: Drumming and snorkeling in Sinai and the Red Sea.
He took small exclusive groups mainly from Scandinavia.
Ibiza
Between Denmark and Sinai he keeps moving, creating and searching (west and South Africa, India, Iceland, NY). Later he arrives in Ibiza (highly recommended by the DJ’s after playing in a club in London) — living there for three years out of a van, creating and playing the biggest and most interesting clubs on the island.
A house made of containers
Years later he returns to Israel to recover a little from all the madness. And then a new chapter begins: he becomes a father for the second time, starts a family, and builds them, with his own hands, a large house out of shipping containers.
And again from the beginning
Fifteen years on, that house comes apart too. A divorce brings him to Haifa, to stay close to his children — and at an age when many people are already looking for stability, he finds himself back at the starting point. Without the house that was his, without the life he knew, and needing to reinvent himself.
But perhaps that is exactly the thread running through the whole story: to play, to paint, to build, to take apart, to love, to fall — and to begin again.
What it is about
Survival
Dyslexia, a childhood spent escaping, and an elite naval unit — what it takes to keep going when nothing is set up in your favour.
Art & freedom
Twenty-five years of earning a living from painting, photography and music — in the street, in the desert, and in the clubs of Ibiza.
Fatherhood
Two families, two countries, and the decision to move city so as to stay close to his children.
Building again
A house raised by hand out of containers, and taken apart fifteen years later — and what remains when it is gone.
Bring the lecture to your audience
The lecture is given at cultural events, community evenings, conferences and private gatherings — and at the studio in Haifa, where it can be combined with a recital on instruments from around the world.