The cat came back
KHIO
Fossveien 24
I made these 10 paintings in a period of 10 days. not necessarily a painting per day. Karin helped me stretching the canvases. I didn't really knew what I was doing. I just wanted to paint big portraits, so I did. After being done with some of them, I felt they were very powerful. The format is perfect, the faces are fast painted in confident strokes and I found them loaded with references to African barber saloons, Chinese propaganda posters, anthropology early drawings by white adventurers in Africa. I also discovered my flaws while painting them. like the slight distortions almost in all of them since I didn't use a projector to make sure every thing was in the right place. I also had similar solutions to different problems and slight cheesiness.
Since I studied painting in Sudan before joining the academy, and all the models we had were Sudanese and men, I found myself always sketching faces of Sudanese men. No deep reason or a hidden message behind that at all. I kept looking at them and thinking what should I write about them?
I thought about writing fictional stories about each character. Like, what if some of them were people I knew from before? One scenario I thought about goes like this :
"I woke up in the middle of the night. I still can't get over the fact that Awad threw me in the Nile when I was 13. I emailed him to let him know that I'm a successful artist now. That people are actually paying money to own my paintings. He emailed me back and said the reason why he threw me in the Nile was because I was a pain in the #######! He said that it seems like I haven't change that much, he noticed after reading my email.
I wrote back to him that I make more money than he does. He didn't reply!
…
Touché!"
I told Geir, one of the curators, about my plan. He talked about the quality of the room where I am planing to show. He said the light there was similar to a church. He said I should try to build the show in a way that will make that room the heart of the show. I listened to him carefully and thought he was right. Those paintings are going to rock anyway ;)
I decided I won't write stories about them. I won't try to find a reasons for painting them or make my self sound smarter by having a mysterious deep conceptual meaning to it that only artists could understand. since its my MA degree show. I will just paint them all from my imagination and hang them really nice.
I went back to my studio and wrote this text.
fadlabi
مهيرة
هيثم طه
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست