While he was traveling for work decorating a mall retail space in Montgomery, Ala. several years ago, Loren Chantland, a local artist who lives on his family’s farm near Ferguson and teaches at the Marshalltown Christian School, had a vision of visiting Israel and specifically saw a dot near the country’s northeast border.

Tel Aviv came to his mind, but he knew that city — Israel’s second largest — was located on the Mediterranean coast. So Chantland, in a bookstore at the time, found a map and put his finger where he thought he had pictured it in his mind. As it turned out, it pointed him to Tsfat (also known as Safed and sometimes spelled Tzfat), a city of approximately 42,000 residents with the highest elevation in the entire country at around 3,700 feet. It is one of four holy cities in Israel and is known as the world capital of the form of mystical Judaism known as Kabbalah, its Klezmer Festival and for its artist community. Ironically enough, Chantland read in a book that the art community was primarily situated on Tel Aviv Street, but he later found out it was actually Tet Vav Street and the author had made a typo.

“I just felt like God wants me to go there, just an overwhelming feeling that God wants me to go there,” he said.

Citing Carl Jung’s axiom that too many coincidences means something can’t possibly be a coincidence, he decided to travel to the Middle East and spend three weeks there in the summer of 2018. The same week he decided to go, his employer handed him a $20,000 check as a token of appreciation.

“It was a strange story getting there, very strange story, and a very strange story being there, but it’s an interesting city,” he said.

While he was there, Chantland couldn’t resist the opportunity to paint a landscape quite different from the central Iowa farms he often captures, instead portraying a view from a hill with mountains and the Sea of Galilee in the background. Almost six years later, he submitted the work to a worldwide contest conducted by TERAVARNA, which describes itself as the world’s largest contemporary art gallery, and received fourth place out of all entries in the landscape category.

For his paintings, Chantland uses a pale and unique shade of blue known as fallow, and when he arrived in Tsfat, he saw the color everywhere.

“It was a wonderful experience. I painted several paintings there and brought them back, and the (award winner) was one of them,” he said. “It’s just a beautiful place. We visited and drove around and stuff and got to know the people… People just know each other, and it’s a community. It was nice just to be in that community.”

Chantland, a Marshall County native who moved home from the Twin Cities after the COVID-19 pandemic, keeps himself busy with art all the time, and he recently completed a more characteristic portrait of some hay bales on the farm of Ron Barnes just off of Highway 30.

To see more of Chantland’s works or commission one for yourself, visit https://www.facebook.com/Chantlandartist/.

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Contact Robert Maharry

at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or

rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.