Dora Holzhandler's paintings are rooted in the mystical perception of reality and depict a timelss Jewish world, often with a Buddhist quality. The twin strands of Holzhandler's spiritual identity - Jewish and Buddhist - are strongly evidenced in her extraordinary work and explored in this superb volume, the first monograph on the art of Dora Holzhandler.

Holzhandler's richly ecorative paintings of everyday, often specifically Jewish, life, are reminiscent of Polish folk art, Indian and Persian miniatures and Roman mosaics. Inspired by Allen Ginsberg's poetry,, Jack Kerouacs' Buddhist-Catholic novels, Aldous Huxley's study of visionary perception and LSD-transfigured ways of seeing, and essays on the mystical path by a Catholic monk, Dora Holzhandler draws no distinction between the sacred and mundane. The artist chooses subjects that are strikingly variant: a little girl skateboarding through a park; Rabbis dancing by Jerusalem's Wailing Wall; punks on London's King's Road. Described by art critic Eric Newton as a "temperamental primitive," Dora Holzhandler is one of the century's most original artists.

"All of Dora Holzhandler's painitings possess an ineffable tenderness, they make us recall our childhoods, our myths, our roots, and if we have severed from these things, they make us long for them in a palpable way. They are little excpanses of sweetness and peace."

- EDNA O'BRIEN