Ranan Lurie

Fudging his age by two years, Ranan enlisted in the Irgun at 14 while still enrolled in school, the Herzliya Gymnasium in Tel Aviv. He trained to become a fighter pilot but was dismissed when he buzzed a beach in the coastal town of Herzliya so closely that a lifeguard dived in the water from his paddleboard to avoid the plane. 

[...]

Among Mr. Lurie’s artwork outside of cartooning is “United Painting,” part of his Fine Art With a Mission project that originated in 2005 with a 75-foot-tall, 600-foot-long installation of multicolored squares and rectangles on display at the United Nations headquarters in New York. (The project’s stated mission was “to unite the world under the umbrella of goodwill and mutual respect.”) Additional sections of “United Painting” were later installed on a satellite orbiting the Earth; still others were delivered by Sherpas to the summit of Mount Everest.

Those peaks were a long way from where he started when Life originally invited him to the United States to promote his first-person account of the Arab-Israeli war, published in June 1967 under the title “A Major’s Long Ride to a Short War.”

“At that time, in 1968,” he told The Times, “we had no contacts, no old boys’ network, virtually no friends or money.

“Everything,” he said, “materialized from my 10 fingers.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/09/arts/ranan-lurie-dead.html