A painting is the capturing of a moment and fixing the image and scene in time forever. Life connects these images, which preserve time and sometimes even transcend it, giving rise to new images and sequences of meanings.
Our images carry their meanings through our relationship with them, whether they depict a scene, an event, a place, or even a mere conception. The artistic work forms based on the artist’s mood, emotions, and their pursuit of expressing an idea. And the mediums and choices may differ between the material, the metaphorical, and the perceptible, but the material is always a vessel fixed on the expression of that idea and meaning.
The image transforms from the mind to the canvas through relationships that are formed between the artist’s inner core and emotions, and the influences that remain present in their memory. The memory may even be renewed by this connection, for a painting can retrieve a time long gone, or be reshaped. Time piles up to create an artwork and scatters to create other times, with their own state and events. Even if events converge or intercept, they expand into the feeling of the moment, whether sorrow or joy, ugliness or beauty, or darkness or light. In every artistic creation, we imprint our moment upon it, a moment of reception, emotion, and interaction.
During my artistic journey, my memory recalls many images and impressions, some deeply engraved, and others hidden, never to be uncovered. Yet these hidden memories give me drive to search for a fleeting moment lost beneath piled-up days and accumulated years.
Each time I unlock a moment in my memory it may lead to new ideas or artwork. Such ideas can feel fleeting like a dream crowded with events that last only a few seconds. I am like a dreamer in these seconds. But my dream is an extension of my existence, to my relationship to my inner and the outer world. My memories recall decades of experience, capturing what remains of what was and what will be.
Among my artworks is ‘‘Nap’’, whose roots go back to 1965. Though it was painted in 1981 during a moment of deep pain, a pain that never faded, it became ingrained in memory. Its traces ebb and flow, but never disappear.
Another artwork is ‘’A Swab on the Head of an Orphan’’, which I drew in 1980, but the idea goes back to the mid-1960s. It shares the same event as ‘’Nap’’, though each is with its own details and vision.
Painting and creating art recall what they can from memories; the rest we retain and remain unstated. Personally, I do not subscribe to the idea of differentiating between the act of painting and completion. Rather, I seek to feel the event itself. In my artwork, I summarize and abstract, to condense meaning in harmony with the artistic path I lead. Restraint and brevity are core to the character of my work.
I build the idea through simple elements and units, then they come together in service to the idea itself.
’’A Swab on the Head of an Orphan’’ (1980), courtesy of Abdulrahman Alsoliman.
