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SAMIA       HALABI

THE IMMORTAL LIVING  LEGEND OF  THE

ABSTRACT ART WORLD AND BEYOND

Elected by our readers worldwide as “THE INTERNATIONAL ARTIST FOR THE MONTH OF MARCH 2003” and “DISTINGUISHED MEMBER OF THE INTERNET ARTISTS HALL OF FAME”

By Maximillien de La Croix

Special and Exclusive for World Art Celebrities Journal, Thursday 27, March 2003, 6:15 PM, Paris, France

For the Arab nations and the world the All mighty God created  extra-ordinary  human beings part legend and part beyond to reign over kingdoms and to immortalize his majesty. He created Ahmad Chawki and Abou Teeb Al-Moutanabi   for poetry…Mohammad Abdel Awab and Riyad Al Sanbathi  for music,  Haroon Al Rashid for wisdom, Salah El Diine Al Ayouby and Tarek Bin Ziyad for mercy, clemency and military genius…Antar for courage and bravery, Oum Kalthoum for singing…and the Lord did not stop there…he continued  one more mile with his creation. One last genius stroke from the hand of the universal creator….He gave to the world SAMIA HALABI, an immortal who walks tall among immortals!

 I had to check into hospital today for an emergency delicate operation but, I told the surgeons and myself, I rather wait until I finish the piece I am writing about my hero Samia Halabi. My assistant Valerie Constand contacted the great lady and asked her permission to use some references and materials about her life as well as to obtain her written consent to publish her art work in this journal. Professor Halabi with grace and humility accepted and honored our request just a few hours ago on this Thursday, the 27^th of March 2003….so I rushed to my desk to honor the ink and the papers I will be using in writing this article about her. You are about to witness a lot of emotion, implosion and explosion in my article, because I am an emotional and a half-crazy man. When I love somebody…When I highly respect somebody…when I deeply admire somebody, and upon writing an article about this “somebody”, I dip my pen in the ink of my heart and I start writing. I begin to feel the responsibility and the beauty of the words…I search for the right phrase…I analyze my thoughts and I sail through my madness to craft an article, a collage of words and sincere feelings, hoping I will do justice to the person I am writing about. And, this is exactly what I am doing right now! I shall write about Samia, the artist, the philosopher, the thinker, the mother of a nation, the human being, the woman with a heart bigger than the world we live in and, we shall enjoy reading about her view and interpretation of artistic beauty, painting and life!

SAMIA HALABI: A BIOGRAPHY

Samia Halaby has been living in her present studio for the past twenty years. It is in an old building in the heart of Tribeca in New York city. She is the third artist to live in her loft space which once was a welding shop in this the garment district. Paintings, drawings, books, and note papers occupy the walls, shelves, and table tops. They give this garage like space its flavor. In the corner of the studio is an older computer on a desk heaped with books, papers, CDs, and diskettes. Similarly accompanied, a second newer computer sits in a corner of her living room which serves as an extension of the studio. She spends her time traveling, painting, writing on art, and teaching. In her youth she visited the museums and architectural monuments of Europe and the Arab World. Now she travels mostly to attend electronic art conferences where ever they take place and she also travels as visiting artists to the Arab World where she has some of her warmest most fascinating friends. Earlier in her life she was a professor of art at many distinguished American Universities. In recent years she has been organizing events of poetry and painting at her loft. In this she finds intellectual stimulation which replaces teaching.

Samia was born on December 12, 1936, in the city of Jerusalem in Palestine. She is the third offspring and first daughter of Asaad Saba Halaby and his wife Foutounie Abdelnour Atallah At the time of her birth and during her childhood Jerusalem was entirely an Arab city. Israeli encroachments had not yet destroyed its delightful flavor. She can still see in her mind's eye the beauty of Jerusalem even through the thick layer of Israeli aggression and terrorism. "In my memory there is a shape like a candle flame, luminescent but cooler in color and warm to the touch. This is the very shape which visually forms in my mind as the aggregate of my memories of Jerusalem. It is made up of grandmothers, visiting relatives, wonderment at fountains in gardens of fruits and blossoms, the turn of a narrow street, the old city walls and shops, the calm and peace of its people, the stone arches and domes of an old bakery, the grand uncle in his shoe repair shop, the vegetable seller on his donkey, and the modern burgeoning new neighborhoods with beeping cars and bustling shops. I remember the persuasion that we lived here in our Jerusalem at the wellsprings of culture. And truthfully, even though a lot of people these days do not like to hear it, next to this lovely shape is another one which is made up of lead gray blotchy burnt small shapes buzzing about like nasty bees. This is the aggregate of my memories of the Israelis"

She began dedicating her time to painting during her first years at graduate school at Michigan State University where she studied with Abstract Expressionist painters who visited the school from New York. As a result of this, like many other art students of the period, she began to think of moving to New York. It was 1960 and the idea was daunting. She decided first to develop her work as she accepted teaching positions. Teaching was then the only way to earn money with an art education.

It was not till 1976 that she finally moved to New York. During this 16 year detour she lived in five different cities continuing to paint actively while teaching. Her professorial career ascended from lesser known art schools to culminate in a position at the countries most distinguished school. She followed this seeming inexorable path of bourgeois success finding along the way that the most distinguished school and its most distinguished professors were in fact less than their less distinguished counterparts. Eventually in mutual antipathy and after ten years of teaching Yale terminated her tenure. By then she had moved to New York and had been living there for six years. Thus without relocation she found that her teaching career had smoothly fulfilled her wishes and left her a practicing artist free of full-time teaching in the city considered to be the world's center of painting. Though the shift from teacher to artist had not entailed relocation it did involve a serious mental and intellectual strain as Samia Halaby decided to accept the advice of friends and fight the University's unethical termination and treatment. This resulted in an interesting exhibition at the 22 Wooster gallery titled "ON TRIAL: The Yale School Of Art."

During 18 years of teaching art at American Universities she found one place she loved. It was Hawaii. After her first year she returned as visiting professor to the University of Hawaii twice. After the most recent return in 1986 one could see the profound influence on her paintings of the tropical vegetation and dramatic light of the islands. One of her finest painting, an installation work dating from 1985 was titled To Niihau from Palestine, and was dedicated to the Hawaiians and to the working class in Hawaii. Niihau is one of the Hawaiian islands which is privately owned and where only Hawaiians of 'pure' decent can live; and they live there in a state similar to slavery. Samia Halaby continues to search for ways to interact with fellow artists in a meaningful way independently of the devastating effects of the art market. In this direction she has tried to host events of poetry reading and showing of paintings. Another is an attempt to publish a Xerox book by artist and poets of international origin in support of the liberation struggles in Palestine and south Africa. Recently she has become active in a group called Arab Women Artists which functions in New York. exhibition of electronic art was in 1993 at the 911 Gallery in Indianapolis -- a gallery devoted to electronic art. Her most recent oils and acrylics solo show was at Darat Al-Funun in Amman in 1995.

She has participated in a number of national and international conferences on computer art. She presented a paper and showed her work at the Fourth International Symposium on Electronic Art in 1994 and will be doing so in 1996 as well. Both papers are printed in the conference proceedings. Samia Halaby also has an electronic studio on the World Wide Web which is visited daily by Web Surfers from all over the world. This studio is much like an exhibition and resembles a book format. In it are essays on her paintings both oil and electronic. She has also placed five essays on Palestine dealing with her memories and experiences. Her professional resume shows a short list of one artist shows and a slightly more substantial list of museums which own her work. this seems to indicate the trouble she has had in making gallery contacts due to chauvinism against women and against Arabs. Yet clearly museum curators have readily recognized the value of her artistic contribution.

Writing is a slow and difficult for her but an endeavor she takes seriously. She has written on recent degenerate art in the New York Galleries, on the being treated as "a minority", on being a Palestinian Arab painter, and an essay comparing the Venice biennial of 1988 to the Havana biennial of 1989. A recent unpublished essay traces the history of twentieth century abstraction. A continuing effort is a small book on the history and theory of pictures in general. She has also written about her own work and is the subject of numerous reviews.

 Journal: Do you welcome criticism?

Samia: I was born in Jerusalem in Palestine in 1936. Losing my country remained painful throughout my life. Pictures have always fascinated me deeply. I spent hours of reverie looking at the little oil paintings my father brought to our home in Yafa. There have been times when paintings possessed me and times when I remember making them with the relaxed ease of a sunny afternoon. Whenever I found myself bored with them I tried to find new directions. There were times of confusion when my friends would fear coming to my house because at such times I would besiege them with requests for criticism.

Journal: Your view on picture on today’s view?

 Samia: Today, flat two dimensional pictures are so numerous, so cheep, and so omnipresent that we forget that only seventy years ago they were rare expensive commodities. I think more pictures were made during the past century than in all previous centuries. We use them for a variety of functions and most of them serve our needs by aiding the production of life's necessities. Pictures are a useful magnificent language. I try to explore the language of pictures. I do not believe that contemporary symbolist and surrealist tendencies will advance the art of picturing. I think they are an artistic dead end. But they are fashionable and my abstract paintings are very unfashionable now. I know! But, I think that it is in the area of abstraction as the concrete imitation of motion in reality that new ideas will grow.

Journal: What is your opinion on pictures and computers?

Samia: In computers I found a medium that caused new developments in my painting. To use this medium for what it can best do and not for imitating older media meant learning to program. I did. Afterward, I wrote programs which produce kinetic paintings with sound. I did this on the Amiga. Now I use a PC. I have written a program which allows me to perform paintings live while jamming with musicians. The computer has brought an intellectual cell-division in my thinking on painting. All that is gestural and textural has gone into my oil and acrylic paintings while the hard geometry that used to be in my static paintings has migrated to my programmed kinetic paintings. Thus the paintings in this studio, although made with the computer, being static reflect more the gestural thinking.”

Journal: What is Abstraction to you? How do you define it?

Samia: Abstraction is just as connected to nature and reality as is illusionism. It relies on reality as its only source. I disagree with historians and critics who claim that it is based on purely mental formulations. Even though the representation of nature may seem more direct in an illusionist painting its presence is not more significant than in abstraction. While illusionist painters approach nature from a single point of view, abstractionists seek to extract and depict general principles of motion. Whereas the illusionists paint their subject while sitting still in one place, an abstract painter may walk around a subject or contemplate how it resembles other things.

Journal: How about shapes and Illusion?

Samia: To paint the morning, Monet painted a cathedral bathed in light from one point of view. He captured the morning colors of a specific season and place. To paint the morning an abstract painter, on the other hand, may select any one of numerous palettes which would describe morning, use the shapes more likely to be seen early in the day, and as much variation of rhythm and detail of texture as would communicate a flavor of morning. Thus while the illusionist captures particulars while the abstractionist captures the essence of things.

Journal: and the content in a painting?

Samia: Abstract representations deal with general principles their content excludes the imaging of particular objects and specific people. This frees them from the burden of illustrating any one nation's mythological and propagandistic agenda. As a consequence, they transcend national boundaries more readily. It makes sense, then, that in the history of the twentieth century, abstraction began with the international spread of Cubism and Constructivism.

                Grand Mother                                            Children of Palestine                                                                     Olive Trees

During the spring of 1996, Samia Halabi spent several weeks collaborating with Professor Vera Tamari in teaching art at BirZeit University. Their project provided all of us with a level of aesthetic satisfaction permeated by love of their land. Photos below: Professor Samia Halabi in Palestine where she conducted seminars and training programs for the children of Palestine.

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Written by Maximillien de La Croix,

Paris, France