Table Settings - Margot Gran
- nonaorbach
- Oct 12
- 5 min read
Updated: Oct 14
I feel many of us are trying to help each other survive.
At some point in my life, I chose to create a family of my own and to place my eyes on beauty. I accepted a deep desire for balance. I chose this over a part of me that was very much in shadow.
For decades, I felt tied to a rock. I felt constant discord, loneliness, and anger. I used art to give a voice to my raw emotional world, but I paid a price. My mental health was challenged. I tried to feel better but could not see or feel hope.
In my later thirties, after many types of therapy, I went to a healer recommended by a friend; a woman who sees through to the soul, who helped me choose life, living and doing.
Margot Gran, Column Scrolls, 2018, watercolor on paper, Biennale of Arts and Design, Muza Museum, Tel Aviv
I learned to live less as a victim and created my world anew. Gradually my urge to express pain made way for a desire for beauty. I still needed darkness to reveal and accentuate the light. I did not mask my negativity, but I made a conscious effort to give it less focus.
As an act and a habit, in 2014, I began “setting tables” for my students in the watercolor courses that I teach.
Setting the table was my and my sister’s job as children. Everything had to be perfect. The napkin neatly folded, the fork atop to the left. The knife’s blade facing the right of the plate, then the soup spoon and then the dessert spoon. Under each plate a placement mat.
A holiday table setting at my mother’s house, using the good dishes she inherited from her mother.
On the sailboat I grew up on, we would be showered with tropical fruit, paddled to the boat by the islanders in their canoes. We were given a lei of fresh Plumeria flowers to put around our necks. The paradise I saw around me for so many years was my lifeline; beauty and “the look of things” filled me with a sense of awe.
The sailboat ‘Brenda Lynn’, where I grew up from 1974 to 76, and an island we sailed to in the Marquéses Islands, S. Pacific
When our father fixed a radio or our mother stitched an islander’s arm, a feast proceeded to take place. There would be a day of preparation in the village. Decorations were made from plants and flowers. There was cooking to do. The chief of the village shot the Papa pig while the piglets squealed and ran in circles around the Mama. I was six and watched all of this.
A long table was set inside a grass hut or under a grass roof with woven coconut leaf mats beneath our feet. There were smells of fire-baked breadfruit, plantains soaked in coconut milk, large green leaves with edible things in them, there was goat meat, and of course, pork. Everything looked exotic, full of life, and the reminder of death. I remember the anguish, and how I could not eat the pork on my plate. I spilled a glass of wine on it to get out of having to eat what caused me such sadness.
I grew up with a parent obsessed with food, meals, and control over others via the plate.
All these elements needed healing. I spent years letting a lot of this find expression in my art. My work was often dark, emotional, and cynical. In 2014, when my partner was pregnant with our son, I started teaching painting. From then onwards, I stopped working in oil paints and focused on water-based mediums in my own artwork, while teaching other painters how to use this complex and versatile technique.
Table and Placements, 2022, watercolor on paper on table under glass, Cliff Gallery, Israel
Here, a decade of exploration and learning began. Watercolor is a difficult medium to master. I needed to let go of control, but also to know how to guide the paint to where I wanted it to go. I liked the element of time, and the tempo that is so important: when to quickly add more paint, and when to wait for one layer to dry before adding the next. I learned that this is a medium that reveals all, including mistakes that I had to learn to accept.
Two of my watercolor paintings from observation, September and October settings, 2025
Watercolor painting requires a dialogue between many parts. It is a medium that is influenced by the artist of course, but also by the type of paper it is placed upon, the type of paintbrush, the amount of water, and of course the forces of nature like the weather, heat, and cold. I learned to be more observant, and attentive outside of myself, when working in this medium. I also learned to relinquish some control.
I began instructing artists and painters how to use watercolors. I had a degree from Bezalel in Fine Arts but struggled to figure out how to approach the new task of teaching. Until then I had spent twelve years working with children in art therapy, and only began teaching when I moved cities, and was about to become a mother, in my late forties.
My mother had been an elementary school teacher in California before we moved onto the boat, where she became my teacher for those four years, and then she worked as an English teacher in Israel for twenty years. She was a creative person, liked rules, was hard working, and compassionate towards her students.
I decided to use my parents' love for the ceremony of the “table-setting” and the universal act of hosting in my teaching. I took aspects of my father’s obsession and control, and my mother’s welcoming personality, and both of their need for rules and aesthetics, to bring healing to this potential space, in my teaching and in my artwork.
The table setting theme, the placements from the family table, and things hidden and surfacing from and around this square or rectangular space, also took form in artwork I created during these years. In the pieces ’Column Scrolls’, ‘Footnotes of a Decade’ and ‘Table and Placements’, I painted natural organic and synthetic objects, in watercolor, from observation, while testing scale and size, and the different ways of working on, and exhibiting these paper pieces.
Meanwhile, I created a watercolor course based on creating a mid-table “setting” for the students who came to me. As art students we always worked on easels, and alone. I sat my student painters around a table, to bring them together, and to invite them in, through an arrangement that was visually alluring.
I create the setting before each lesson. I place simple, everyday objects in front of the participants, atop a piece of white cotton cloth: plates, cups, bowls, fruit, vegetables, bottles, filled and empty, branches, leaves. I place a piece of white cotton cloth that a dear friend bought me upon request, from a market in India. I fold the cloth into a narrow strip, and year after year, course after course, arrange objects for each lesson.
I do this as a visual teaching tool and as a ritual, a preparation, a way to get myself into the right state of mind, before meeting and teaching a new group of people. It is a welcoming gesture. I want to teach to observe shape, color, beauty, reflections, light and shadow, through things familiar and close.
Many classes are color-themed, and then my table arrangements are set accordingly. I work on these settings several days before class, collecting objects from around the neighborhood or at the store, and creating a setting that is simple and intuitive. It is not a composition of “Nature Morte”, but rather an expression of hope, a recognition of sameness, light, and the beauty of life.
Working in my studio and installing my 8-meter scroll, ‘Footnotes for a Decade’, 2021, Zuzu Gallery,
Gallery photographs: Yuval Hai
Margot Gran: granmargot@gmail.com
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