An avid lover of life
Saturday, June 21, 2014
Friday, June 20, 2014
What's so special...
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| Reflection 6.14, oil & mixed media on canvas, 24x20" |
A micro window into the lake blasting warm and cool hues, was the reason this frame became a painting. The yellow rather dominating creeps into cadmium and vermilion leading to a dive into the blues.
Reflection series have been my companion for over 3 years, its a run away to reflect upon my high energy life, my analysis paralysis thinking, and my diaspora.
Getting lost on a surface murmuring with texture, surprising colors and fluidity, helps me understand this captivating life we live: full of emotions, daily revelation and adaptability.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Migration, Diasporas and Borders Reaction paper by Manal Boushakra
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| Uprooted by Weeda Hamdan |
The reaction paper will adapt some of Edward Said’s theories from his piece ‘Reflections on Exile’[1] to Weeda Hamdan’s painting ‘Uprooted’, the title makes it very suitable to read it as a depiction of exile. I will show how Hamdan points to the importance of history, the struggle with identity and her use of colours to depict the feeling of loss associated with exile.
Brah (1996) stressed the importance of tracing historical genealogies in diasporic communities to analyze their relationality across fields of social relations, subjectivity and identity[2], in the painting Hamdan’s striking depiction of the roots alongside the characters almost draws out an agreement on the importance of history. The roots, suggesting history, exist firmly to the left of or behind the characters, as though they have left their traditional community behind to move on to a different kind of life but the roots remain, both in the picture and perhaps in the unconscious, or in the back of the mind, of these travellers. The branches are emphasized with a light blue-green almost fluroscent colour allowing them to stand out, as if to emphasize to their bearers history is here to stay. Even though not central to their lives (the roots are not drawn between the characters) tradition remains part of those who have left. The branches intricately connect as if mimicking the various journeys on which those in exile have had to embark and the importance of acknowledging these routes to understand crucial concepts of social relations, subjectivity and identity.
Despite the importance of the relations between these roots, the exiled exist in solitude, Said (2000) writes, as ‘aggregates of humanity (that) loiter as refugees and displaced persons,’ Hamdan paints these lost souls. In ‘Uprooted’ almost each figure is looking in a different direction or the opposite of the other, reflecting the lack of a sense of community that shares united thoughts and visions. They stand apart scattered and the space in between them depicts an emptiness or a void that they cannot fill but is instead engulfed by their environment, these are ‘the deprivations felt as not being with others in the communal habitation’. The characters are not only displaced geographically by losing their community but also, as already mentioned, psychologically where the experience of emptiness reflects on their sense of identity, these characters bear no faces. Almost all are standing tall and well dressed, we can trace hats and perhaps regal looking dresses, yet despite these details there are no eyes or mouths that hint at any form of expression, they are merely silhouettes. Yet they still stand tall, some with hands on their waist, chin high almost fooling us with their smart dress and immaculate figures that nevertheless disappoint; they lack personal features, we can never guess what they are as individuals.
This contradiction suggests a falsity or a false presence that results from the struggle of adapting to an alien environment while retaining oneself. There is no one self but an artificial adaptation of one self that is shown on all their faces, they all have the same (one) empty look, the look of psychological displacement. This faceless depiction of the characters conveys a lack of identity despite their apparent ‘fitting in’ with a modern society (they are well dressed and standing as confident ‘individuals’). Their absent faces reminded me of Said’s analysis tracing the theme of exile in Conrad’s novels whose exiled characters fear ‘the spectacle of a solitary death illuminated... by unresponsive, uncommunicating eyes’, the same eyes in the painting that refuse to exist let alone communicate a response to our interest. Said himself sees exile as death ‘but without death’s ultimate mercy’, Hamdan depicts the mercilessness by traping the characters underground. They are painted at the side of the roots suggesting they exist on the same level, buried underground where the deceased belong yet they are alive, their lost souls escaping the merciness of death. ‘No sooner does one get accustomed to (exile) than its unsettling force erupts anew’, this unsettling force is the previously mentioned environment that engulfs the spaces between the characters, the force is expressed through the varying textures of the painting. The surface of the painting seems much less smooth around the characters with the colours green and blue than, in what seems, the flatter red forming the portrait of the painting. The colours blue and green are painted in a zigzag fashion depicting, in the words of Wallace Stevens quoted by Said, exile’s ‘‘mind of winter’ in which the pathos of summer and autumn as much as the potential of spring are nearby but unobtainable’. Hamdan interweaves the summer colour of blue skies and the spring colour of green grass with all her characters but never within them; the colours of freedom remain unobtainable.
I have briefly shown how the importance of the history of the exiled is depicted in the striking portrayal of the roots, how displacement results in a loss of community and identity depicted in the characters’ random positioning and absent faces. Also how the blue-green colours depict the erupting force of exile yet also the bright colours, associated with summer and spring (when one is most likely to wander freely), that never form part of the characters, reflecting their trapped sense of displacement.
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