We bought canvases and acrylic colors, unearthed the long-buried brushes and palettes, and set up our painting space outside —— complete with a “Man2al” (coal-box), hot tea, and pop-corn. It was my brother Hisham’s idea to put Friday off for a family painting event.

Omar and Hisham decided to replicate Edward Munch’s “The Scream”, and Kasimir Malevich’s “Red House”. I painted a portray of my parents, my mother made a sketch of my father, and Gus, um, improvised.

Hisham’s buddy Ahed documented the event, and Ayah experimented with watercolors. Musa played PlayStation inside with buddies Alaa’ and Fouad :)

(Special thanks to the awesome Ahed Hijjawi for the daylight pictures)

I have always believed that a sense of art is something you learn, rather than something you are born with. It’s a craft, a technique. You learn how to hold a brush, how to look, how to think, how to feel. Of course, you do need to have the patience for that sort of thing, it’s really very much an inclination the same way that playing video games is an inclination.

I think my brother Omar has shaken that belief.

You see, while Hisham and I have shown an interest in art since we were very young, and then we went ahead to get an education in architecture and fine arts respectively, Omar has never, ever shown an interest. I do not remember Omar sitting with Hisham and I as we sketched as kids, I do not remember Omar saying anything about painting unless it had to do with making fun of me and Hisham, “Idiots, come play XBox with me!”

After taking a few off-hand pointers from me (I felt like he was wasting my time, I mean seriously, how could he do anything?), Omar concentrated on doing a good job with replicating Edward Munch’s “The Scream”. Understand: Before that minute, Omar has never held a brush in his life, let alone mixed colors, or saw the details in a painting.

With that said, I present you with the final results of our art day:

(Hisham got bored, so this is only half-way done, but look at how pretty the sky is!)

This is how it should look when it’s done:

And finally, Omar’s:

As compared to:

What do you think? Is art taught or inherent?

Meet my little friends, who all live on and around my workspace, and keep me entertained at a much higher efficiency than most human folk.

Plush Mario, a gift from my friend Aseel, lives next to my keyboard.

\
Roobs&Moose, a wedding gift created by Sabbagh Al-Sagheer, live behind me on the wall.

Suicide Man, which I made from a roll of scotchtape, committed suicide from the top of my deskyop, and now lives tangled in the wires of my mouse.

Humpty dumpty, made by Y, a fat guy with a moustache on a stick, lives on top of my desktop, right on top of the heart that gets him groovin’.

Magic dinosaur, a cut out assembled by Y, lives next to my “consumables”, and follows you with his head with his super magical abilities.
 

One of the most useful things I ever learned in middle-school was in physics (believe it or not). It was quite a simple lesson: lines are the backbone of everything. Al digital imagery is basically a series of lines, including circles, and curves, and everything in between.

That day, I went home and tried it out myself, on MS Paint. Lo, and behold, our physics teacher was right. It was so easy to draw things when you worked with straight lines, rather than anything else.

That’s when my infatuation with digital illustration began. 

Today, I found these old illustrations I used to do in my spare time as a young teenager. We’re talking roughly through 1998 to 2002, when I was 12 to 16 or something like that, and they were all done on MS. Paint. Some of the blurry effects were done on another Microsoft photo editing software. I don’t remember what it was called now, I only discovered it in the very end of my MS Paint life.

Then of course, soon after, I went into design school and fell in love with the most perfect design tool ever; Illustrator, and MS Paint went bye-bye for good.

But I gotta admit that at first I had a really hard time figuring out Illustrator, as it is a very advanced tool and you really cannot draw with lines, although I spent the first couple of years trying :)

Phase 1:

One of my first few experiments. Hand-drawn text. Notice how ragged everything is because it was all composed with lines. The second was composed with scans of text.

Phase 2:
Adding imagery to No Doubt lyrics.

Phase 3:
The discovery of “blur” tools.

Phase 4:
The masterpieces phase :) That’s when I discovered that blur is ugly, and that it’s so much more fun to draw sort of based on reality.
This one for example is quite amazing, if you knew my family then, you’d be able to tell who each one is. Each person is also wearing the most worn outfit they wore that summer. I have two more of these, Dallal Summer ‘00, and Dallal Summer ‘01.

Well, that’s it I guess. These days I’m experimenting with realistic vector illustrations, which are quite easy but take so long to get done. For example, I started doing this several months ago, but the  only parts of her face that I finished were her eyes, nose and lips.

Here’s an interview I had with Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff in the June 2009 issue of Nox:

Words: Roba Al-Assi, Images: Ibrahim Owais

“Why the hell is a bourgeois publication interested in interviewing a pro-Palestinian cartoonist?” asks the skinny 40-something in a black and white keffiyeh. If it wasn’t Carlos Latuff, the now legendary Brazilian political cartoonist, we might have been offended. But for a man who has made a career championing a political cause some 15,000 kilometres away from the home he shares with his working class parents in Rio de Janeiro, a cup of tea is probably a means of capitalist oppression. And having avoided the temptation to question why being pro-Palestinian and bourgeois were somehow mutually exclusive – he might want to visit Abdoun to appreciate how many Palestinians have successfully graduated from the refugee camp – we managed to convince him that as Arabs, some of us actually Palestinian, the NOX staff does care rather a lot about the 40-year occupation. Maybe even as much as he does.

Bad first impressions aside, we moved to a comfortable spot in Darat al-Funun, the scene of an exhibition and talk, and he proved more than willing to discuss his career-long commitment to the cause. “I am an ordinary guy,” he says. “There is nothing special about me. The special thing in this whole formula is the Palestinian people. They transform ordinary people to pro-Palestinian activists – this is why I am here, this is why I am now displaying my art in Amman. It’s the Palestinians. Me, I am just ordinary.”

A crowd of well-over 500 people who attended the event would no doubt dispute his claims of “ordinariness”. Latuff, a cartoonist from Brazil, came to focus almost exclusively on Palestine after his visit to Hebron in 1998 and a conversation with a local man. “Khalid Idriss did not know me, neither knew what I did for a living,” he explained in the talk. “To him I was someone from the outside and his story can be echoed through me. So he invited me to his home. He took out his wallet and started pulling out broken teeth,” Latuff recounted passionately. “I said, ‘Jesus Christ, what is this?’ And he said, ‘It’s all the teeth I lost to the butts of the M16s of both Israeli settlers and soldiers.’ He then brought his teenage daughter and lifted her shirt off her back to show me all the scars and wounds. So I promised him to get his story out. Today, I am still keeping my word.”

manual br :)

You were one of the top finishers in Iran’s 2006 International Holocaust Cartoon Competition. Aren’t you afraid of being accused of being anti-Semitic?

Carlos Latuff: Of course, I was bashed as a racist and anti-Semite. But have you seen the cartoon that won? It does not deny the holocaust, but actually reaffirms it. Today, we are witnessing a whole new holocaust against the Palestinians, and yet you can’t even say that in the media. I don’t care if people call me anti-Semitic, and I don’t care about what people think of me; I care about the Palestinians. It’s really amazing that when the Western media heard about the International Holocaust Cartoon Competition, they all cried “Rage!”. Just a few weeks earlier, they were defending “freedom of speech” over the Mohammad cartoon incident. Their double standards were exposed, and I saw a good a chance to make a point about the Palestinian cause.

Have you had many problems with censorship?

CL: In 2002, the Independent Media Centre in Switzerland was shut down over claims of anti-Semitism after they published my series “We are all Palestinians”. The cartoons portrayed Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, Black South Africans, Native North Americans and Tibetans in China. All of these groups are drawn saying, “I am Palestinian”. A few months later, police in Israel arrested the editor. I have not only dealt with censorship, but also with police brutality, and blacklisting. I can’t visit Palestine because of my cartoons.

You sometimes need to rely on stereotypes to make the average person understand, but stereotypes can also be clichés. How do you create a balance?

CL: I have no problems with clichés. Cartoons should not only be accessible to intellectuals – they need to be clear enough to be understood by the janitor as well as the CEO. They should be like street signs, which everyone can understand. My real problem is fighting the negative clichés and stereotypes that people have.

An active member of Deviant Art, an active blogger, a supporter of Creative Commons… You are all over the internet. Would you say that the internet and social web was a main channel for your activism?

CL: Without the internet, this interview would not be possible. The internet has opened a very big window for me, and without it the mainstream Western media would have never published my work. Western media loves representing Israel as the victim, and as a result people see no difference between the Taliban and the PFLP! But I don’t have a Facebook account. There is a Facebook profile of an impersonator, but that’s not me.

Do you see a change in the West’s outlook with alternative media providing a slightly more balanced view?

CL: Absolutely. I think that people’s perception of the Palestinian cause is slowly changing. For example, Brazilian magazine Istoé, which is equivalent to Newsweek, had “Terrorismo de Israel” on their cover with an image of a Palestinian woman crying in front of her ravaged house. I would have never thought in a million years I’d see the day when a mainstream Brazilian magazine would have the Palestinian cause on the cover! Israel cannot keep convincing people that the 410 children who died in Gaza were killed for security reasons. Yes, Israel is losing ground, and I hope to help erode the credibility of Israel.

In a world where even air is packaged and sold, why do you encourage people to freely print and reproduce your work?

CL: It is very important for people all over the world to feel free to print out, reproduce and distribute my work however they wish. In a capitalist system, everything is produced for money, but my artwork is not for sale, they are made to be spread around, to counter the Western media war against Palestine. They are also to fight Islamophobia, although I am not Muslim myself. This isn’t about money, or cartooning, or anything like that. It is about love. I love the Palestinian people! I dedicate my art to Khalid Idriss, I know you are in Hebron and you can’t hear me, and I know that I can’t visit you because Israel has blacklisted me, but I am here in Amman, and I have kept my promise.

Carlos Latuff’s work can bee seen at his Deviant Art webpage.
He also has a comic series named Tales of Iraq War, where his superhero, Juba, is a Baghdad sniper.

For freelance writing inquiries, contact me at the address available in the “Contact” tab on top.

Courtsey of my mother and brother Hisham, who organized, printed, stenciled, and watched-over this mural to make sure it got done so prettily. You can see it from the back of the house if you’re driving by, but of course, the best view is from the garden :)

I am a digital person. Proudly too. Yes, getting elbow deep in clay, markers, paint, and other kinds of delicious smelling raw-materials always ranks a 10 on the dude-I’m-so-happy meter, but it’s not efficient. The clone tool in Photoshop is efficient. Instant gradients in Illustrator are efficient. Apple + z. F7 for layers. Apple + T for type. You know?

And there’s also color efficiency. Beautiful, vivid colors a mouse slide away. Color wheels that come in a million formats: HTML, RGB, CMYK, HSB, duotones. The wheels have endless ways of forming themselves.

~

The other day, I needed to use some food coloring to get some food
stuff to look pretty. The colors came in four small tubes: red, yellow,
green, and blue.

The four colors of my childhood that were later shattered by rockets of pixels and Pantones.

I
was amazed at my brain as I mixed them together. I couldn’t see them as
simply red, yellow, green and blue. My mind was instantly doing
calculations, imagining the Illustrator color slider that is
permanently on show on the right-hand-side of my screen.

My mind
would drag the cursor, trying to substitute the nonexistent K,
horrified that it can’t get that perfectly rich shade of K to mix with
my colors. Then my mind would switch the slider to RGB, but the blue
wasn’t real B, it was B with tons of R.

I
am often accused of being color-blind by “normal” people. I can’t get
myself to agree that that shirt is bright blue, because bright blue to
me is C, and that shirt has a little Y in it, so it is not bright blue.
But get a “normal” person to see that.

~

A 6-hours-a-week “Color Theory” course was mandatory at the Fine Arts Department. Of course. Design is after all, the lowest form of “art”, and the department preferred catering to the students specializing in painting, or graphic arts, or all the other sorts of elbow-deep specializations.

I’d spend double the hours at home for the projects assigned to that class. Painting color wheels manually. A drop of white in a drop of red, plus another drop of white, then a drop of black. It’s as precise as math. I wasn’t very good at it, I do not have the patience.

~

Yes. I live in a world of CMYK. And it’s awesome.

Fingers crossed. You know what I mean.

<3

A very unfortunate reality is that we go through school learning about Leonardo Da Vinci, impressionism, and great architectural masterpieces like the Roman Colosseum. What we never learn about is Sinan, Munamnamat, and Maqamat Al Hariri, although they really should be taught in schools as an essential part of our collective heritage in the Arab and Islamic world.

A turning point in my way of thought took place during my first lecture with the previous dean of our faculty, Wijdan. Her first question to us was, “What is your identity?” After a few random answers from the students, including “Arab”, “female” and “Jordanian”, she told us that no, our identity falls under that of the Muslim civilisation, whether Christian or non-religious, male or female, Arab or Turkish.

In that instance, I couldn’t comprehend what she meant. I didn’t know anything about the Muslim Civilization aside from what they taught in history classes, and I found it really hard to relate to the Seljuks, the Persians, and the Fatimids. I can barely relate to my neighbors who live upstairs. The Arab world in its current state is so vast and so diverse, with different languages, gene-pools, and geographic settings. How was I supposed to relate to the 1,500 year history of Islamic civilization, which once reached all known corners of the earth?

That class was called “Introduction to Islamic Art”, and as we went along with the course, I started to understand what she meant. Islamic history is beautifully complicated and diverse, and brought a lot of amazing things to this world. Our contributions to science, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, and art are numerous.

I really enjoyed that class, although I still do not agree to identity myself as “a person under the Muslim civilization”. I am, after all, secular, and I do believe that the top contributions that people living in the Muslim civilization gave to the world where all given in times when religious fanaticism wasn’t all the rage, but vice-versa.

It came out when Muslims were open minded: when the West would burn Greek philosophy in the Middle Ages because it was “pagan” while Muslims would translate it to Arabic so as to save it.

Maybe that’s why we are never taught about our heritage in ways other than “Ibn Khaldoun was a great historian who was born in Tunisia”. It’s because they were all formulated in the Islamic Golden Age, which we love to boast about, but never really discuss in depth. If we were to discuss it, after all, we’ll all realize that it is heretical by today’s standards, and that would probably get more people to think, and thinking is never good.

Ijtihad is the willingness to both accept and challenge authority within the same process, especially in ethical matters. The early Abbassid state was secular, there was separation of theology and law. Muslims used to draw the prophet. Early Muslim scientists and philosophers developed some of the first theories on evolution, and the transmutation of species, which were widely taught in medieval Islamic schools.

But that aside, did I ever mention that Islamic art is really underappreciated, and really beautiful?

Some of my favorite pieces:

Persian Miniatures

Abbassid Art

Ummayyad Art (frescos in Qusayr Amra, one of Jordan’s Ummayyad desert castles)

Andalusian Pottery:

That’s it for now. I’ll share the rest later.

Do you have any favorites? If you have any favorite pieces of Islamic art, link them in the comments, and I’ll be sure to include them in the next post.

The four passports that were stamped as their owners boarded the 8:00 PM flight to Beirut all had 48 pages. Two were blue, one was black, and one was green. They were all Jordanian passports though.

The flight is perhaps the coolest in the world. You go up in the air, and just as you are about to open your book, you hear the lady on the microphone say that the plane has started its descent to the AlHariri International Airport.

The weather, she informs, is a summerish 19 degrees celscius. It is the weekend where the famous Beiruti cliche actually works: swim on the coast, and go up and ski an hour later in the mountains.

The streets of Beirut are as crowded as hell, severe rush hour style, except its always rush hour in that city. We head to the temporary residence, Yasmeen’s 9th floor apartment in the middle of Hamra, with the see on your left and the snowy mountain peaks on your right.

Yasmeen is naturally our tour guide, along with a few of her friends: Richi, Didi, and Rakan.

~
~

Look up. Look down.

Whether your neck cranks up towards the skies or down to look at the asphalt, there’s always an interesting perspective, as if the city was put together as Lego by an architect who could only see things sliced with lines running all over the canvas.
I don’t know why I was so struck by the geometry of it all.

Still abandoned. Still injured.

My first visit to Beirut horrified me. I couldn’t understand how that city so famous for its night life, hot women, and pop culture could be in such shitty shape and no one ever talked about it. Living in the brand spanking new Riyadh and the well-maintained West Amman, the sites of life going on along with the bullet-hole ridden buildings and a whole lot of urban decaying really horrified me.

This time round, it was a bit easier, though still not easy.

Really, it’s amazing what people can do to one another.

Inspiration Nation.

How can a city be so inspiring? The Lebanese certainly have an eye for detail and a huge lot of competition for being the most creative. Everything in Beirut in one way or another has a punch line. The signage of the city, old and new, is given special attention. The way people are dressed calls for essays on individualism. Even the little hot dog stand outside AUB gets creative with how they make their frankfurters.
Speaking of the food, damn food, everything is finger-licking delcious. From the Manaeesh you get off the street to the sushi to humus. Yum.

Grafitti-o.

It’s apparently not only perfectly legal to grafitti the walls of Beirut, but also encouraged, even as a part of graduation projects of AUB art students. I love the grafitti they have there. It’s smart, it’s well-done, and it occassionally makes you wonder.

and my favorite, Nasrallah on a bike: :)

48 x 2= The Four Days in Beirut.

But it wasn’t all observations. Though being the bullshitter that I am, I can probably go on forever with categories and observations…

Till the next use of my 48 pages.

(Interested in filling them up with a trip to your country? :) I make a fantastic tourist advertiser :P )

(A big sorry for all the people with bad bandwidth)

Back. Expect more. Soon.