Brush with death inspires Israeli artist's surreal cellphone snaps

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Streaming city traffic reimagined as the stroke of a paintbrush. The train of a woman's gown flaring out to meld with desert dunes. A real rainbow rising from a rainbow-coloured umbrella.

Eitan Asraf's smartphone snapshots are anything but mundane - a style the Israeli artist attributes to his near-drowning, in 2016, after his paraglider crashed in a wastewater reservoir.

"Ever since I came back to life I choose to document life itself from an unusual perspective," he told Reuters. "I choose to document it from a slightly different angle because this is where the true magic lies."

Asraf, a documentarian with 108,000 Facebook followers and more than 56,000 on Instagram, has spent COVID lockdowns roving through Israel's cities and natural expanses on foot, angling his mobile phone to achieve the desired, surreal compositions.

"Everything you see with your eyes was created for you," he said. "You choose whether you want to document or ignore it."

(Writing by Dan Williams; editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)