Ode to a Mother

Ode to a Mother is among a series of non-conventional format paintings that I’ve made in an attempt to revisit traditional mounted canvas’ paintings on wood and bring three-dimensional fluid forms into my art. On a white drapery canvas, I painted the continuous symbiotic process of love and birth of a crumbling city with a tortured past that keeps inspiring me, Beirut. I redrew my visual memory of places I’ve been and streets I’ve walked, projecting forward and backward at once, to reimagine my city beyond the atrocities of wars and political unrest. The metaphor Beirut-mother plays a central role in my work taking the form of an interlaced abstraction of what is both real and symbolic in the feminine body and urban patterns. The lines are a walk down memory lane, traced in the form of umbilical cords extended between the city and its land. They are the streets, the strolls, the curves, and the scars. Beirut’s dilapidated evolution is marked by an asymmetric interplay of dissimilar street plans and block arrangements. All, in varying states and patterns, stand side by side to form a progressive poetic rhythm. My urban fabric is borderless, solid, and resistant, typically freed from its frame. It is a mere reflection of a city that is always bursting to rebel and realign boundaries.