To Draw A Sound

By Hamzeh Abu-Fakher, *Sufi chants* - Forward Syria - Syria
August 3, 2010/Issue 42

A Sufi, a thinker, and an artist; Asaad Arabi commands all at the tip of his brush, drawing sounds with his lines, reaching ‘high notes’ with his colors, all in his quest to combine the senses.

Forward sat down with Arabi to disperse the clouds of his misunderstood works, in order to gauge a more nuanced understanding of his latest collection, dedicated to Um Kalthoum.

Why Um Kalthoum?
Many people considered Um Kalthoum to be the best Oriental and Arabic artist. She is a cultural figure, she influenced the whole world; she even made western music ‘repent’ to intuitional Sufi; repent to the true path of music.

She combined all the religious and Sufi music inspirations turning them to an existential human experience, and that had all the best musicians and composers give her their tunes; she was the only artist to manage to get all the geniuses of her era behind her.

She is the key reminder of the validity of a chance to live a true existential life. She was dubbed ‘The Princess of the Fine Era’ because her age cannot be brought about again.

What is so special about her music?
The build up. The basic build up of Um Kalthoum’s music is akin to that of the Hindus and Buddhists state of trance; it is a nirvana of music inside a mundane world. Like drowning and sinking in music for hours.

And how do you express that with your brush?
Using colors, they are the ‘highest notes’ in the painting. They way the colors are changing and transitioning, and the way they grab your attention forcing your focus away from a segment of the canvas to another.

How do you express audio with visuals? How to draw a sound?
The two are intricately linked, and any observer of Um Kalthoum will notice that; where visually she used to rely on her hands and body movements swayed by her music, and obstructing those would weaken her vocal performance.

I’ve been studying and conducting my own research on the visual and audio correlation for nine years now, which is mostly reflected and expressed in Sufi Islam, and I’ve reached the conclusion that their relation stems from their unity in the heart [intuition]—the unity of the senses.

You can get the audio from any visual. In drawing you symbolize the difference of intonations using empty and filled spaces, and lines struggling with colors leading the viewer’s focus to different contrasts.

How does intuition come into play when viewing your works?
Intuition reflects our current existential lives, the state of being, knowing, and controlling your life. Living life, and not just passing by, is a high existential intuition, and can only be connected to if experienced.

This applies to music and arts as well. As I wouldn’t want viewers just to regard the visual aspects of my works, I want people to connect and live the colors and margins, to be stirred by their conveyed meanings.

Why solely express sound through your art, why not another medium?
Ibn Khaldoon once said, “When a virtuous city corrupts, the first aspect to plunge is its architecture, followed by its music;” the first to decay after housing is music, which shows its importance in the expressions of a complete collective consciousness of a culture.

So Um Kalthoum’s era signified a rise in society and culture, which was also proven through the economics and politics of that era, while currently longing for that era we compare the past to our current times, to find that all aspects of our civilization have taken a downfall, including our music, which isn’t only commercial, but adheres to certain aspects of our roots in a misguided way. By clinging to our culture we’re simply killing it, by denying it development and evolution we’re singing its obituary.

How does that affect your technique, as being habited and schooled differently?
I’m more guided by intuition now, resigning the old notions of strict guidelines of drawing, especially after an accident befell me and my family a few years ago. Now I’m more spontaneous in drawing—spontaneity guided by intuition—helping me reflect more depths of my character on the canvas.

Masked Bodies
Asaad Arabi’s previous collection, Masked Bodies, depicted nude characters in an architectural arrangement, within margins left on the four sides; a tradition of miniatures in Arab Islamic manuscripts.

His collection received regional religiosly-fuelled disdain, within the current hostile trend against figurative painting, including the few artworks remaining of thousands of Arabic and Islamic miniatures and illuminated manuscripts.

Leaders of these hostilities seem to forget that the art revolution which occurred in the 1960s was a result of the openness and permissiveness of society at the time, which employed six male and female nude models in the painting studios at the Faculty of Fine Art in Damascus University, and that has led to the mastery of anatomy by most artists of that era.

The catalogues of ‘Masked Bodies’ is still available in Ayyam Gallery for those who have fallen victim to the media black-out.

Picture: Asaad Arabi. Photo: Carole al-Farah