Painting
After art school in America, I returned to Lebanon to be with my ageing father. I set up my studio at my father’s house in the small Northern village of Kfarzeina where I come from.
If you have any notion about the history of the country, the early Eighties were not the best of times to move back to Lebanon. While no time is really a good time to move to Lebanon, that particular decade was especially turbulent.
Painting was my medium and I found myself experimenting with different paints (oils, acrylics, aerosols, or a combination thereof) on different supports (glass, formica, canvas board) to create.
Oils on Glass & Multi-Surfaces
Undeniably a very beautiful country, Lebanon was really a place where fear and hopelessness reigned supreme in the Eighties. The country itself became my inspiration including and especially the violence. My faces were never happy ones and my series Faces of War reflects the fear and hopelessness of the people who were living under such chaotic and violent conditions.
This was the first series I created after graduation and after having moved back to the village in North Lebanon.
Multiple transparent glass panels were the support for this series, and the design was fragmented among each of them so that, once they all came together in the frame, they would create the finished artwork.
In this series, they are mainly oil paints on glass.
Painting on Reverse Glass
After my experiment with painting on there glass panels, my next series took me to painting on reverse glass. I would be applying my different paints on the back of the glass pane. Literally painting upside down.
I was using very thin layers of oil-based paints with water-based ones forcing and guiding them to work and fight together to produce the final artwork once the glass was flipped around.
Having worked rather blind from the back, the results were almost always surprising to me.
Painting on Paper
Similar to my Painting on Reverse Glass series, in this project I was using oil-based and water-based paints to achieve an array of results.