Sam Halaby, “The Color Hunter,” is a distinctive figure in the local and regional art scene, with growing international recognition. His artistic work, closely tied to his life and the cultural fabric of Daliyat al-Carmel—his home and studio—reflects a broader artistic trend: transforming private space into an immersive artwork. This challenges traditional boundaries between art, architecture, design, and environment.
His house, set on a hill amid stunning natural surroundings, is visible from many points. Created in defiance of conventional museum norms, accessibility standards, and community expectations, it adds vibrant color to the rural landscape, delights visitors, and brings joy to all who see it. Rather than selling the valuable property, Halaby turned it into an art project, a decision rooted in a silent dialogue with his father—one that has proven wise.
His “House of Colors” has drawn over a million visitors to the village in two years.
This transformation recalls Frida Kahlo’s “La Casa Azul,” which embodied her personal and political identity. Similarly, Halaby’s use
of vivid colors, recycled materials, symbolism, and folk elements expresses deep cultural identity.
As a member of the Druze community—an ethnic minority in a country marked by immigration and change—his work navigates tensions between tradition and innovation, center and periphery, private and collective identity.
Halaby paints in thousands of hues, using powerful drips and bold splashes to create new textures across canvases and his home’s
surfaces. His work evokes Claude Monet’s transformation of his Giverny home into a living artwork of color and nature.
Halaby’s technique also invites comparison to Jackson Pollock’s drip painting—an expression of unconscious action—but differs in intent.
Like Pollock, Sam Francis used drips and fluid paint for creative freedom, influenced by Zen and Eastern arts. Joan Mitchell also employed drips and smears in emotionally charged, intuitive compositions. Halaby’s work channels this expressive lineage with a
distinct voice.
He appeals to a new generation of collectors—including tech entrepreneurs—as well as established collectors. By situating his
large studio in the village’s commercial center, Halaby embeds his practice within daily life, declaring, “Here I am, among you.”
Later expanding into the House of Colors, his work became both cultural preservation and subtle protest against exclusion. It shows how domestic space can serve as a site for artistic action. His House of Colors fosters interaction rather than passive viewing, sparking dialogue between past and present, identity and creativity. It has become an international cultural landmark,
boosting local businesses and offering a replicable model of artistic impact.
Halaby’s vision recalls Salvador Dalí’s surreal museum-home and Niki de Saint Phalle’s feminist Tarot Garden. Like them, Halaby
redefines domestic space as the art itself. His work embodies the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art.
Doron Polak / International Artists Museum
The colorful trees and flowers carry with them a sense of life, growth, and vital renewal, at times evoking internal visions – an expression of Halaby’s inner world. As the tenth child, after nine sisters in his family, he expresses his sense of self as the exceptional, independent son, the new creator bringing fresh and innovative spirit to his family’s artistic tradition.
There is no doubt that his childhood experiences connected him to nature and to the Carmel landscape of his childhood, as a metaphor for hope, spiritual search, or yearning for cosmic unity. In contrast, the black-and-white tree paintings serve as spaces for pause and reflection, memory, identity complexity, and at times, also experiences of alienation or loss.
The choice of black-and-white can also be interpreted as criticism of a gray or polarized political and social reality in which the living presence of color and emotion is denied. Through this duality, the tree – a recurring central motif in his work – becomes a dynamic
image, charged with symbolic, personal, and collective meanings alike.
Through the tension between intense colorfulness and monochromatic lines, Halaby generates dialogue between past and present, between individual and collective identity, and between hope and complex reality.
Doron Polak
